The murder of Emily Keyes on Wednesday was rough on Tom Mauser. Every school shooting brings back painful memories, but this one was so close, and so many of the images from Platte Canyon High School were familiar, it made the crime particularly awful.
"The helicopters, the kids running from the school, the buses, the parents waiting for their kids at another school ...
"Obviously there have been other school shootings since Columbine, but this one was especially difficult," said the father of Columbine shooting victim Daniel Mauser. Seven years later, he can be back in that moment in a heartbeat.
"The first stage is just the shock," Mauser said of the process of coping with something no parent should have to face. "People would use words like 'the incident.' I always hated that word. Or they would call it 'the massacre' or 'the tragedy.' Face it, it's a murder. They were murdered," he said. And that word "has such a heavy connotation to it."
Part of that connotation is that murder should be preventable, or at least that a parent, a teacher, a cop should be able to protect a child from it.
"You spend a lot of time wondering why they were deserving of this, why did this person choose my child for murder," Mauser said. Then months or maybe years later, the parent of a murdered child must face the reality that, unfair as it is, the child is not coming back and life is changed forever.
It's not closure, Mauser said. Closure is a myth. If anything, it's modest acceptance that life goes on.
"For me the key was thinking, 'What would Daniel want me to do?' I came to the conclusion that I don't think Daniel wants us to be miserable people trying to figure this out for the rest of our lives."
Mauser and his wife, Linda, grieved in very different ways. A very private person, she drew inward. Mauser channeled his grief into activism.
"I realized skills and gifts I had that I could use in public speaking, in acting in a proactive way, in leading," he said. "It was all rolled into the healing process for me."
Mauser has become a national leader in the movement to outlaw automatic weapons and to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. His outspokenness was a product of "that adrenaline rush that comes from going through what I went through."
He also turned his grief into deeper relationships with his family, impatience with petty differences that divide people and a close identification with the survivors of violent crime.
Like the kids who weren't killed in the library at Columbine, the survivors of last week's hostage crisis at Platte Canyon High School worry him.
The names of the killers and the victims will be remembered, but in a very short time the survivors will be alone to deal with their fears and their nightmares, to wonder why they lived and Emily Keyes didn't. "They will tend to be the forgotten ones," he said. "Those lives are changed forever."
It makes him angry.
"I don't think anything in the laws could have changed what happened," Mauser said. The killer, Duane Morrison, was not prohibited from owning a gun. And when someone is suicidal and murderous, "I don't think there's a whole lot you can do. It's just a question of who he was going to take with him."
The proliferation of guns in the U.S. makes it too easy, though, he said. "The fact that it's a readily available tool for getting out one's frustrations or lack of power or in this case this man's sickness, that really raises my blood pressure."
So as another wave of grief washes over him, Mauser will reach out to his wife, his 21-year-old daughter, Christine, and his 6-year-old daughter, Madeline. He'll hit the streets campaigning against candidates who oppose the modest gun-
control measures he supports. He'll remember Daniel, and his heart will break all over again thinking about the child who was killed and children terrorized in their high school in Bailey.
He'll feel all the pain anew because it never ever goes away.
