NATIONAL AFFAIRS
HEALING SHATTERED LIVES HOW SURVIVORS OF MASS SHOOTINGS ARE HELPING A NEW GENERATION BY ETHA N B AUER
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daughter or nephew made it out alive. “That leaves you standing there or missy mendo, the news of March 22 came in a text message. It thinking, ‘Well, I guess God didn’t bless me,’” Mauser says. always does. “I love you, are you OK?” A flurry of similar messages Mauser scrambled to pick up the pieces of his life and assemble them followed. Mendo, 36, usually tries to shut out news of mass shootings and into something purposeful once more. To do so, he didn’t need encouravoid the internet to keep her memories and emotions bottled up. But this agement to overcome. He didn’t need dismissiveness or exhaustion from time, the fact that the shooting unfolded just 45 minutes from her home in people who hadn’t known his pain. But he didn’t know what he needed Boulder, Colorado, at her preferred grocery store chain, made the horror either. “You’re just kind of wandering aimlessly,” he admits. harder to avoid. About a month after the shooting, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to Mendo was 14, a freshman in math class, when two students attacked meet other parents who’d lost their children to gun violence. They told Columbine High School in suburban Denver. She heard the pop of gunhim he would never get over what happened, and he fire, then a strange rumble, like students were bangshouldn’t expect to. But with time the intensity of ing on lockers. She peered into the hallway and saw his pain should ebb. Finally, someone had answers. a stream of teens sprinting toward the exit. Finally, And he found more understanding among others someone yelled a warning: “They have guns, they who lost kids at Columbine. “Nobody knew what have bombs, get out of here.” you were going through like these other parents,” he At home, a red light blinked on her answering “A HUG FROM explains. “We were going through this together.” machine. In message after message, parents asked if ANOTHER SURVIVOR IS DIFFERENT Research backs up Mauser’s observations. In a Mendo had seen their missing kids. That night she FROM SOMEONE 2019 paper published in the journal Victims & Ofslept between her parents, in her tennis shoes, doing WHO IS TRYING fenders, Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor of crimipainful arithmetic to figure out which of her classTO CONSOLE YOU,” nal justice at the State University of New York at mates might be dead. Sleepless, she wondered why MENDO SAYS. Oswego, and an expert on mass shootings, wrote she had been spared, why others had not, why this about interviews with 16 Columbine survivors and school, why these parents, why, why, why? For weeks concluded, “the need to provide social support and and months, she found no answers, and no one who cultivate solidarity among survivors is crucial to pavunderstood her pain. This was 22 years ago, before ing the way to a healthy recovery.” She also found mass shootings had become endemic to American that the most effective support came from “similar society. Help was hard to find. others,” or people who had experienced the tragedy in a similar way. Today, that has changed. Mendo and others like her are passing on The more similar, the better. After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2014, what they’ve learned as survivors to new generations. They’ve been for example, Mauser was invited to Newtown, Connecticut. He figured brought together not by choice, but by circumstance and a shared histohe’d have nothing to offer to the parents of murdered first graders. “I ry and experience few can understand. For many, these groups become thought I had it bad, but I had it nothing like what these people were a second family, a place where they feel safe. “A hug from another surgoing through,” he says. “But they wanted us there.” They asked almost vivor,” Mendo likes to say, “is different from someone who is trying to the same questions Mauser had all those years ago, so he passed along console you.” what he’d learned. Just ask Tom Mauser. After his 15-year-old son, Daniel, died at That simple idea — that survivors are not alone — drives the support Columbine, he had nowhere to turn for answers, for relief. People with groups that have emerged across the U.S. Mendo works for one called The good intentions would approach him at the grocery store to tell him Rebels Project, based in Colorado, founded by Columbine survivors after how sorry they were — but also how blessed they were that their own
28 DESERET MAGAZINE
ILLUST RAT IO N BY BR AD HOLLAND
