From the get-go, my son Noah was a skeptical kid who took little at face value. When I would tell him, “There’s nothing you could ever do to change how much I love you,” he would take it as a challenge. “What if I robbed a bank? What if I punched Nathan in the face? Would you still love me?”

I assured him that I would.

Once he asked, “What if I ran away from home?” We’d recently read Where the Wild Things Are.

I told him, “I would be so sad if you left. But I would still love you.”

I don’t remember if my son ever asked, “What if I killed someone?” At that age, Noah probably couldn’t conceive of murder. But if he had asked, I would have said yes, never dreaming that someday he would put me to the test.

Someday came October 31, 2015.

On that Halloween Day ten years ago, Noah went on a shooting spree in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing the first three people he encountered before being killed by police in a shootout. His victims, none of whom he’d met before, were Andrew Myers, 35, Jennifer Vasquez, 42, and Christina Galella-Baccus, 34. Each was a parent of two.

At the time, my son was 33 years old, and we lived in New York City, two time zones away. But in the critical days leading up to the shooting, my husband Dave and I were in almost daily contact with him, mainly through long texts because he kept hanging up on us. We knew by then that he was in a mental health crisis, undoubtedly triggered by his replacing prescription bipolar meds with large quantities of weed and a stimulant-like drug called modafinil, which he ordered from overseas.

Naturally, we were extremely concerned, and over the course of the next two weeks, we begged him to get help and tried our best to intervene. We took certain steps; we failed to take others. But in light of the tragic outcome, we will always live with sorrow and regret that we didn’t do more, and sooner.

Which leads directly to the mystery I want to address here: Why do even loving, well-intentioned parents so often miss the signs of a troubled young man’s slide toward violence?

The reasons are myriad, of course. But I propose that no small part of the problem is hiding in a single word.

Like many, whenever I heard about yet another soulless gunman murdering innocent people, I muttered to myself about monsters. You hear voices in the news and on social media doing the same. And who can blame us? What Noah did was, indeed, a monstrous thing. A heinous act that, in that moment, made Noah less than human.

But I’ve come to see that when we label perpetrators “monsters,” we unwittingly propagate a false picture of what a shooter looks like. And it’s the exceptionally rare mother (or other loved one) who is ever going to look at her troubled son and see an evil creature capable of senseless murder.

I certainly couldn’t.

Up until two weeks before the shooting, Noah was the antithesis of the guy you expect to go on a shooting rampage. Sure, he had struggled with alcohol before finally getting sober at 26. And at 27, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (which runs in our family the way cancer does in some others). But he had never been in trouble with the law, had never hurt anyone, or threatened to. He had a great work ethic, cared about his health and fitness, had plenty of friends, and—best of all—was extremely close with his family.

It was enough to convince us and those around him, probably including his coworkers, that despite his marked, even disturbing changes in behavior and mood, he was not at risk of unleashing violence.

In a painful bit of irony, it’s not a stretch to say that in the lead-up to the shooting, Noah’s general good-guy reputation was the most dangerous thing about him.

If only he’d looked more like a monster.

In their book, The Violence Project, Jillian Peterson and James Densley write about interviewing the childhood girlfriend of one of the worst mass murderers in history. They describe her as teary-eyed as she said, “When you label them monsters, you erase the ability for anyone to think someone in their life could do this.”

This is why I take risks to humanize Noah. As the mother of a shooter who failed to see danger coming, it’s a message I want to spread. Before any of these shooters ever picked up a gun, they looked like our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.

A couple weeks ago, some of our family had gathered at my son Nathan’s house. His wife, Kelsey, was busy cooking, and at one point she asked Nathan to run to the store for an item she needed. He grabbed his keys and dashed out the door.

A few minutes later, my almost three-year-old grandson, Rowe, realized his dad was gone and asked where he was.

“Daddy just ran to the store,” I told him cheerily. “He’ll be right back!”

Instantly, his face flashed surprise and then hurt. “But I want to go with him!” he cried. He raced to the front window and saw that his father’s car was gone. “I want to go to the store with my daddy!”

He started to sob and then dropped to the floor, his entire body writhing in protest. “I want to go with Daddy!”

I kept telling him, “Daddy will be right back, Rowe. In just a few minutes!”

But he was inconsolable. Wailing.

Finally, I invited Rowe to join me on the front stoop to watch for Nathan’s return. “That way, we’ll see Daddy as soon as he drives up,” I said. “And he will be so happy to see you!”

Rowe got to his feet, still crying, and followed me outside. We parked ourselves on the front step, and I put my arm around his bony little back. “It’s going to be okay!” I assured him. “Daddy will be home soon.”

For the next couple minutes, I tried to distract Rowe. And to reason with him. I reminded him that his dad will go to the store “a hundred more times and you can go with him!”

But this thought only seemed to upset him more. “I want to go now!” he sobbed, throwing back his head.

I wondered how such enormous feelings could reside in such a small person. And how something as ordinary as a trip to the store could trigger such an avalanche of pain.

But the longer we sat there, the more I felt Rowe’s despair. And the more I realized how valid his crisis really was. To feel like you’ve been left behind is to feel abandoned. Like you don’t matter. And to know you’re missing out on a wonderful experience with someone you love, someone who defines your world…

Why wouldn’t you wail?

I thought, too, about what I want and need from others when I’m devastated. I don’t want a reframe, a fix, or to be told that whatever is bothering me is not that bad. I want someone to name my sadness and agree that it’s awful.

 So I changed my approach. “Rowe, I’m so sorry that you didn’t get to go to the store with your daddy,” I said, rubbing his back. “No wonder you’re sad. That must really hurt.”

For the first time, he turned his wet face up to me. “Yes,” he said. “It weelly hurts!” And burst into tears again.

I worried that maybe I had stoked his pain. But soon, he took some shuddering breaths and I felt his little body start to settle. We talked about a friend at school. And then—the heavens opened, the angels sang—there was Nathan pulling up in the driveway.

Rowe, thrilled, jumped to his feet squealing, “Daddy!”

Yet when Nathan got out of the car and picked him up, Rowe got upset again. “Daddy, I wanted to come! But you were gone!”

I recognized this feeling, too. The mix of relief and recrimination. 

Nathan explained to Rowe how sorry he was. How he had thought Rowe was busy playing with his cousin.

Still, a bit of hurt lingered on Rowe’s face. Some things are just so hard to get over. 

Of course, I think of my grief around Noah’s death. 

The anniversary is days away. I admit there are still moments when I feel angry at the universe. I want my son back. Today. And the idea that I’ll get to see Noah in the next life is about as comforting to me as my assurance probably was to Rowe that his father would be home soon.

Soon is relative. And when your loss is permanent, soon sounds like forever.

But since our little wait on the steps, my exchange with Rowe has brought me comfort. Something about bearing witness to his heartbreak has made it just a little easier to believe in a universe that lovingly bears witness to my own. I can almost imagine a world in which I am the toddler, inconsolable, and Love joins me on the stoop and says, “I know it still hurts. Tell me more.”

If you think of it on Halloween, say a prayer for us and for the loved ones of Noah’s victims. Even nine years on, it’s an impossibly hard day for many.

As usual, our own family will gather at a nearby neighborhood so that our five grandkids can trick-or-treat together. There will be drama, glitter, zany costumes, and candy corn. And possibly, tears. 

Some of us are bound to have big feelings, and hopefully we will honor them all.

.

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A friend of mine, Caroline Beidler, recently wrote a book called, You Are Not Your Trauma. The book is insightful, honest, raw. But she had me at the title. You are more than the terrible things that have happened to you.

I hold on to that insight now, but it’s something I didn’t used to understand or believe. In fact, from the moment I learned what my adult son Noah had done, I felt sure his violence would define me for the rest of my days.

“Mother of a shooter” became the main way I identified myself—both in my own mind and, at times, to the world. Anything else I could point to—writing, hobbies, family—seemed pointless and insignificant by comparison.

I was my trauma.

Early on, I practically led with it.

One morning when we were still living in New York, I found myself sharing an elevator with a woman who lived with her son a few apartments down from us on the 23^rd floor of our Midtown high rise. I knew her name was Hazel, but that’s about all.  

The doors had barely closed when she asked how I was doing. And then she asked if I had kids. Which is when I started to sob. “My son committed a shooting!” I blurted. And out poured the awful story as we rode down to the lobby where she patiently heard me out, her tiny dog whining all the while for his walk.

My encounter with Hazel is just one example of what became a pattern. Me blurting out my story to almost anyone who would listen. Or inserting it into conversations meant to be about something else. It’s like I was so centered on my trauma that I lost my grasp on what was socially acceptable.

Of course, the vulnerability hangovers were awful. I had so much shame after an ill-timed spill.

It wasn’t until I moved to Portland and got involved with a grief group for mothers that I began to think more carefully about my relationship with my trauma. My ears perked up when other mothers said things like, “My daughter’s suicide is not my whole story. It’s just a part of my story.”

By then, I was in therapy, working hard to heal, and writing a book about what had happened. At some point, my therapist asked, “What if it’s time to move on from the story about Noah? What would that look like?”

She meant the book. But what I heard was a deeper question: What if it’s time to find a new path forward, one not wholly defined by the tragedy?

At first, I shrank from the idea. It sounded way too much like letting go of my son. Or giving up on hope. I think a part of me felt like if I stopped telling the Noah story, I would lose my power to change how it ended.

There was grief in moving on. But in time, I felt myself being gently ushered into a new era. One that today isn’t all about Noah.

At least not in the old way.

Of course I see the irony. Here I am writing about all of this—for the public, no less. But perhaps I can finally do so, and without shame, precisely because  I’m no longer so attached to the story. It’s like I’m outside of it now, talking about the past. My trauma, awful as it was, is something that happened, not something I am.

What a relief!

I notice another irony. By far, the largest part of my healing—what has brought me to a better place— has come from processing my story aloud with my therapists, husband, sister, sponsor, friends, and grief group. It turns out that there are many good reasons to share our stories, and most of them don’t mean we’re over identifying with our trauma. They can just as easily mean we’re doing the hard work of addressing it head on. Trying our best to turn something monstrous and unacceptable into a narrative we can safely express.

In fact, I read somewhere that you have to tell your story a hundred times to heal.

A hundred times!

Hmm. That number sounds low to me. 😉

I’d love to hear from you. I hope you’ll check out Caroline’s book.

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Yesterday, my husband Dave decided spur of the moment to go on a solo camping trip.

As we hugged goodbye, he noticed a new bottle of my perfume on the counter. He picked it up and said, “Would it be pervy for me to spray this on myself so that while I’m away I can smell you?”

I laughed as he sprayed some on his collar.

His leaving now is good timing. I also have time off from my regular job writing reports for a psychologist, so it gives me time to talk to you.

For those who used to read my blog, I thought I’d tell you a bit about where I’ve been all these years, in terms of writing.

After Noah’s death in 2015, I was of course insane with grief for a very long time. I doubted I would stay alive, much less write again. But you can only sob and look at photos for so many hours in a day. At some point, I went back to work on a novel I’d been writing before the tragedy. What a relief! It felt so good to trade my world for a fictional one.

My blog was a different story, though. After a few months, I wrote a couple posts, including one telling readers what had happened. They responded with an outpouring of sympathy and concern. I was grateful, but given the horror my son had wrought [see About], their kindness felt incongruous. Undeserved.

 A couple commenters agreed with me.  

After that, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was disqualified from writing about my life for public consumption. I imagined that if I wrote about the shooting or my grief, I would appear to be seeking attention or sympathy. But if I wrote about anything other than the shooting, I would seem oblivious and uncaring.

Ergo, my long silence.

During those first years, I didn’t cope well at all. There was a drinking relapse. A psych unit stay. A marriage crisis. And a deep rift with God.

I wasn’t reaching for healing so much as thrashing around in my pain.

Then, around 2018, something shifted. With the help of a therapist, I began to deal with my guilt and shame. I revisited the scene of the crime, something I had resisted. And I became willing to face hard truths about Noah and his culpability.

Eventually, I decided to write a book about what happened. It seemed like the most good I could do, especially given my vocation. What if our family’s experience, including our missteps, wrong assumptions, and lack of knowledge leading up to the shooting could help other parents of troubled adult sons?

What came next was a lot of looking back, reconstructing timelines, and delving into painful memories. It was devastating work, but healing, too. A little like exposure therapy. It felt like every time I revisited a painful moment, some of the trauma lessened.

I wrote on and off for four long years. Dave helped with the writing, too, especially toward the end. The result was a well-crafted and brutally honest story. But now it was time to ask the real question: How many readers would actually spend money to take such a harrowing journey?

The answer from publishers was clear: Not enough. Especially since I had no platform to promote the book.

For a time, Dave and I considered self-publishing. It would be easy, since my sister is a professional typesetter.

But something gave me pause.

And that pause has lasted more than a year.

Maybe someday I’ll make revisions and move forward. Or maybe I’ll decide that I wrote the book for catharsis only, and it should never see the light of day.

The latter would be disappointing. But it would also signify something kind of astonishing. It would mean that the writer part of me loved the broken and hurting part of me so much that she was willing to slave away on that book all those years—just to help that girl heal.

Who knew I loved myself so much? 

Now, I hope I love myself enough to keep on writing here. It’s such a scary thing to even try. I’m sure I’ll talk more about Noah’s story; I have so much to say about related topics, like addiction and mental illness.

But I also want to talk about what’s going on right now. Because my life is pretty amazing these days. I have a job I like. Wonderful friends. A son who lives nearby.

And a husband who wants to smell like me.

(Not pervy at all, Dave.)

Thanks so much for reading. I’d love to hear from you!

It’s suicide prevention month, and my heart tells me that it’s time to talk about Liz, a young woman I met through recovery back in 2012. I still remember the first time we met for coffee. I was taken by her apple green eyes. The wisdom beyond her years. Her quickness to be vulnerable with me. It didn’t take long for me to learn that in addition to alcoholism, she struggled with depression, anxiety, and Tourette’s (hers most often manifested by excessive throat clearing at inopportune times). 

A couple months later, I introduced Liz to my son Noah (a brief summary of his story is on my About page). When they began to date, the match made sense; Noah was also in recovery and had long struggled with depression and a complicated emotional life. The new couple often came by our house for dinner, and soon Liz came to feel like part of the family. 

We affectionately called her Lizzie-Pie. 

When after nine months Liz and Noah broke up, it was weirdly hard to tell. They continued right on walking their dogs together, visiting Costco on Saturdays, and coming by our house for dinner. A lot. Soon, Liz invited Noah to rent a room at her house. She used to say that she was so much more than Noah’s ex-girlfriend. They were each other’s “person.” 

On October 31, 2015, when Noah committed his unthinkable act and was killed by police, Liz was horrified and shattered. We all were. But in the months to come, she let it be known that she wanted the friendship with us to continue. And it wasn’t just about me; she adored Dave, who loved her like a daughter. 

Over the years, we remained close, and Liz and I talked and texted often. She came to stay a few days with us, first in New York City, and then in Portland. A couple times, the three of us met up at Liz’s family’s beach house in Manzanita, Oregon.  

Meanwhile, Liz’s life-long battle with depression seemed to intensify after Noah’s death. At one point, she sought inpatient help at a clinic in Arizona. Then last summer, she became so clinically depressed that she could hardly function. She told me she was running out of new medications to try. And while ECT therapy seemed to help, it caused severe jaw pain and scrambled her brain; after a treatment, she could hardly hold a conversation.  

When she began to sound hopeless, I became deeply concerned. More than once I cried to Dave, “I can’t lose Lizzy, too!”

I tried to keep in closer touch. When Liz was well enough to talk, she would warn me off of begging her to live or saying how much I needed her, which felt manipulative and guilt-inducing to her. So I tried to simply sit with her in her darkness, pain, and exhaustion. Sometimes, she wanted to hear stories about our dog, Mondo, as she was a huge dog lover. Always, she wanted to hear how I was. 

 When Liz’s aunt called me on August 29, 2023, to tell me that Lizzie had died of suicide, I was on our front porch sitting on our old chartreuse velvet couch. It was the same one I’d been sitting on when a friend delivered the news about Noah. Again, I let out a long, strange wail of protest. I kept picturing Liz during her last visit. She was standing on a chair in my kitchen, happily rearranging my cupboards (Liz had become a professional organizer), blonde ponytail bobbing. 

How could she be gone? 

She was only 35, with so much life ahead of her! 

At some point in my grief, I wondered what I might have done differently. What if I had shown up at her door in Texas and begged her to move to Portland? What if I had called her on that specific day?

By now, though, I knew better than to think I had that kind of power over Liz’s choices. In fact, it would be an insult to her memory to imagine that the fearsome foe she faced was actually such a small matter that some word or act from me could have saved her. 

Suicide is preventable, and many folks survive attempts and go on to lead rich lives. But it strikes me that some forms of mental illness are terminal in nature, and I think Liz’s was that kind. It wasn’t that she didn’t want her life. She absolutely loved life—right up to the moment her aching hands finally slipped from the monkey bars she’d been hanging from for so long. 

Last week marked the one-year-anniversary of her death. Dave I visited a beach near to where we used to go with Liz. As the ocean roared and my feet sunk in the sand, I kept thinking of all the obstacles Liz had faced in her brief life. I marveled at how brave she had been, including how she never went back to drinking, even at the end. 

I can only hope to have half of her courage.  

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