Alcohol I Wish I Had Consumed

This article is not in final draft form. I wanted to share it anyway. I know my readers are excellent at grammar and can decipher anything.

The Alcohol I Wish I Had Consumed:

When people mention alcohol consumption it is usually with regret for having too much. I have never heard of someone regretting not drinking. However I deeply, deeply regret not drinking large amounts of alcohol the night of April 20, 1999. It was a Tuesday, one of the first warm Spring days when one feels extra hopeful because of the warm sunshine and smell of Spring everywhere. I working as a School Counselor at Evergreen Middle School in Jefferson county. I was on lunch duty and someone said there had been, “a shooting at Columbine.” Later we would learn “a shooting” to be thirteen precious people. Shortly after returning to my office after lunch duty parents started showing up to pick up their students. I stopped working to help collect all of the students who were being summoned to the main office. We did not have the news on I was getting reports from parents. With each parent that walked in the news grew ever worse. The three lines on phone rang constantly. I felt my normal Spring Tuesday silently slipping away.

Fast forward to after school around 3pm. I am driving home down I -70 back into the city. I have the radio on, reports are filled with a group responsible for the shootings called the “trench coat mafia”. I had never heard of this term it felt as unfamiliar as the day did. I was lost in a fog when I was on 6th Ave. I blindly turned south on Wadsworth Ave. in a pushing pull to go to Columbine. I drove south on Wadsworth Ave until I saw the sea of helicopters then turned East. I had no idea where Columbine High School even was. I worked in the foothills in western Jefferson County and never made it this far south. People were parking on Bowels Ave. typically a very busy street, it was now a parking lot. I got out of the car and walked to Hops a local restaurant. I went into the bar to call my husband to say I would be home late. The place was packed, people were drinking like it was a Friday night not a Tuesday at 3:30pm. This should have been a clue for me to join them. Unfortunately, the thought did not even cross my mind. I wanted to go to Columbine and help. I wanted to help the people hurting there. After leaving Hops I walked to a nearby library. Buses were there to take people to the evacuation center which was Leawood Elementary. I got on a waiting bus and it took off. I had no idea where I was going we rode in silence. I asked someone on the bus if they had heard from Patty the art teacher, the only person that I knew who worked at Columbine. Someone said she was alive. I asked her if I could use her cell phone to call her best friend Brenda. She said sure. She handed me the phone I looked at the phone like it was a foreign object. I had dialed Brenda's number 100 times we had been friends for years. I knew none of her digits. I politely handed the phone back to the lady and swallowed hard. My mind was not my mind but someone else's. I knew Brenda's number and could dial it with my eye's closed, not today. The bus arrived and we departed into Leawood. As I walked into the school immediately I saw parents looking at pieces of large butcher paper with names hastily scribbled on it. Someone had had a little foresight to ask students to sign the paper before they ran away to safety. As parents found their students names there were sighs of great relief. Their sighs were mixed with stone silence from other families. I started asking the silent families what their students names were and we search the butcher paper for clues to their life. It was very difficult to search and search and not find the names you were so hoping to find. From the amount of names on the paper I knew not every student had signed it. I said to the families not everyone signed, I told them to go home to check in on their children.

This was before cell phones were common. US West had graciously arrived and set up a bank of phones all running out of a single outlet. They had spliced the line and 10 phones on a table were available to anxious callers. Families were frantically on them. Dominoes had donated 40 or more pizzas. The empty boxes were stacked against the wall and scattered on the floor. I got the feeling I was walking into a scene that had been going on for awhile. It was now almost 4pm. The gym was full of families waiting to be reunited with their children. There were a lot of other counselor's in the gym so I did not spend too much time there. The next day on Good Morning America I would see Isaiah Shoels father. He was in the gym the whole time I was at Leawood. The next day on the news he was in the same Dallas Cowboys sports jacket that he was wearing on Tuesday night. Isaiah never got to experience another intoxicating Spring day in Denver.

Next, I went to the main office to try and be useful. There were four lines ringing in, the news was on. They were now saying 25 people were dead. My mouth dropped open. While I gasped, I was also partially speaking, “Hello Leawood Elementary can I help you?” I could hear that my voice was not my own. My mind was not my own, my voice was not my own, this day was not my own. I pressed on somehow. With no one telling me what to do I had taken a seat in the Principal's office and began answering a phone that was out of control. I answered questions the best I could with no real knowledge of what was going on. I stayed at this post for hours. At one point I looked up to see our district nurse Betty Fitzpatrick pass by, her face said it all. The horror on her face made me so glad I was sitting at Leawood not at the high school. With no words spoken I could tell that she had just been identifying bodies at the high school. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. She passed by me in silence.

About 9pm the Principal came in and told us to go home. She said they would be having school here tomorrow and people should get some rest. I will never forget the disbelief on the PE teacher's face who was working a nearby phone. He said, “You are kidding me right? Is Columbine also having school tomorrow?” Leawood was open for business on Wednesday morning. I bet the custodians didn't even both to lock up that night. Because night melted into morning while a community struggling to breathe.

I walked out of Leawood dazed. I had no idea the magnitude of the media that had arrived while I had been on the phone. How did they get to Littleton, CO. so quickly? The district had kept the media to the curb. As I walked out a well-dressed man put his microphone toward my mouth and said, “Are you a victim or someone here who is helping.?” I said, “I have no idea.” This was an honest answer. I felt like a victim after witnessing the grief and chaos of the last few hours. I was not sure I helped anyone while I was at Leawood. I tried. I had not been like the administrators from the district that all lined one wall with their arms folded. All of them had the same stance. “I am here, but I am not doing anything.” They didn't do anything the whole time I was at Leawood. They were not helping parents or answering phones. They were just there. They wouldn't even clean up the Dominoes boxes that littered the floor.

A secretary who had been answering phones with me saw me being questioned by the reporter. She said, “Ride with us.” I said “Okay”. Hitching rides with unfamiliar forms of transportation was becoming easier. Just then her husband pulled up in their SUV. I got in the back door quickly. They drove me back to Bowles Ave. I sat quietly in the back and listened their conversation, it was so honest and without blame. More a stating of facts than feelings. I could tell he was glad to be picking up his wife and taking her safely home. I wished someone was taking me home.

Time had been suspended the last few hours as I got in my car it felt strange to be alone. I finally exhaled for the first time since lunch. I do not remember driving home. When I walked in the house my husband had the TV on. He handed me a list of six or seven people who had called to check on me. I looked at the list and the seriousness of the situation became conscious. I wish I had saved the list.

In the following weeks, I returned to Leawood and the neighboring middle school Ken Carl to do follow-up counseling work with the students. All of them had been impacted by the tragedy in different yet similar ways. It was heartbreaking to listen to their stories.

I wish after school I gone to the liquor store bought a bottle of top shelf Tequila, ordered a pizza and bread sticks and called it good. I wish I had slowly sipped on my rescue liquid while I watch the unfolding news, rather than being in the eye of the storm. While I was at Leawood we had no idea what was going on outside the walls of the school. We were in a weird vortex of space, time stood still but raced at the same time. Had I watch the Columbine tragedy from my living room rather than from Leawood I would have been a more intact person. Watching from my house would have given me a hangover possibly yet spared my career as a Counselor. Hangover vs. no career, hangover vs. no career. It is a cakewalk which one I should have picked. I choose poorly, but with the purest of intentions. I am still regretfully paying for the decision not to drink in safety today.

In the weeks that followed, it was hard to maintain. Somehow I managed to finish the year and showed up for work every day. I had no idea how the events of 4/20/99 would effect me later. Not even a small clue. For me to even have a curiosity clue would have been nice. I thought I had weathered this massively awful storm fairly intact. It was not until June 2011 over twelve years after the massacre that I would learn otherwise. In 2010 I took a leave of absence from Jefferson County Schools to peruse a writing career and care for my daughtIer's full time. I was able to take a one-year leave and return to a job in the district. I was interviewing in the spring of 2011 and not finding a school. A friend told me I should asked to be placed at a school. I made one phone call then later in the week I received a call back that I would be placed at Columbine for the 2011-12 school year. I said, “Okay.” I had a feeling this was a bad idea but wanted to be grateful that they had found me job and I thought I would be fine. Time heals all wounds right? What a viciously deceptive this line is, it should be removed from our vocabulary at once. Time did nothing to heal my wounds, time only intensified them.

I walked into Columbine HS for the first time on July 30, 2011 to voices inside my head saying, “You will be okay, you will be okay.” I was not okay. Walking into the main office was a walk into a nonoptional 4/20 memorial. The first thing I saw was Lauren Townsend's jersey in a well-made frame, my heart sank. All of the other 4/20 memorabilia filled the walls. I flashed back to reports of when the shooters stormed through the main office and secretaries had hid under desks and prayed for their lives. I could not shake this intensity.

I was greeted by different people, “Hi, Welcome to Columbine.” “Hi. Glad to be here.” I smiled. In my head I heard gun shots, I thought of Mr. Sanders who quietly bleed to death. I looked for the shooters around every corner. How was I ever going to make this work? I had no idea, either good or bad ideas as to how to cross the minefield of thoughts I was flooded with.

I endured at Columbine for 11 sleepless weeks. I was not functioning when I left. When I was there I felt flight or fight every day when I walked into the school doors. I walked over the blue and silver Rebel tiled to the floor every morning. This is where the shooting first started. I had no short term memory while at the school, all of my thoughts were tied up in thoughts of safety. I would log every student contact/parent conversation in our Campus Scheduling system to recall later to serve as my memory. I had conversations that I do not remember having. I was receiving a lot of new information with a new job and new school. None of this information actually went into my brain. My brain was gray matter when I was within the walls of Columbine. I could not bring back my mind, I could not feel safe. I could not stop thinking of 4/20. I would leave school, go to a meeting and start to feel better. Then the panic, anxiety and fear would hit me with wave after wave as soon as I reentered the doors. I kept wondering how everyone else was functioning? Then I looked around none of these people even worked for the district in 1999. None of them were a first responded the night of April 20. Maybe they were the lucky ones safely tucked in at home with an arsenal of alcohol. I was without a net, without a memory and reeling from one day to the next. The entire time I worked at Columbine someone in my family or myself was sick. Working or trying to work all day then going home to care for ill children was overwhelming. But not as bad as when I finally came down with the house hold illness. I dragged myself to work and only took one day off. I lived my life in 24-hour increments it was pure survival.

I had heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had read about it, worked with students who had it. I thought I understood it. When I was on the other side of the disorder it was a completely different story. It makes functioning impossible. It makes working impossible. New information that one meets with everyday bounces off one self not leaving any mark that the information was even presented. I knew I had to leave. I did not want to let the students, staff, and school community down. I had enough sick days to call in sick for several months. I felt like this was wrong. Even though I was waking up at 3:00am every night in full on terror anticipating the next day. I would not go back to sleep but anxiously lay awake waiting for yet another day when I got to cross the Rebel and reenter the Hell zone. By Wednesday the sleep derivation plus the PTSD made the end of the week nothing short of horrendous.

I left Columbine in October 2011. I had nightmares until April the next year. Once the nightmares ceased I began looking for another school counseling job. I am still looking for a job. I have heard more times than I can count, “Thank you for your interest in the school counseling position. We have chosen a different candidate. Best of luck in your job search.” There is no luck out there for me. There is however massive opportunities to be unemployed or underemployed. Had I not been a first responder I would not have had a traumatic reaction to working at Columbine. Had I not been a first responder I would still have a career. My children would be able to attend College. I will always remember the Tequila I did not ingest and regret deeply that Columbine happened and that I was willingly a part of it.

,The Alcohol I Wish I Had Consumed:

When people mention alcohol consumption it is usually with regret for having too much. I have never heard of someone regretting not drinking. However I deeply, deeply regret not drinking large amounts of alcohol the night of April 20, 1999. It was a Tuesday, one of the first warm Spring days when one feels extra hopeful because of the warm sunshine and smell of Spring everywhere. I working as achool Counselor at Evergreen Middle School. I was on lunch duty and someone said there had been, “a shooting at Columbine.” Later we would learn “a shooting” to be thirteen precious people. Shortly after returning to my office after lunch duty parents started showing up to pick up their students. I stopped working to help in the main office and collect all of the students who were being summoned to the main office. We did not have the news on I was getting reports from parents. With each parent that walked in the news grew ever orse. The phone rang constantly. I felt my normal Spring Tuesday silently slipping away.

Fast forward to after school around 3pm. I am driving home down I -70 back into the city. I have the radio on, reports are filled with a group responsible for the shootings called the “trench coat mafia”. I had never heard of this term it felt as unfamiliar as the day did. I was lost in a fog when I was on 6th Ave. I blindly turned south on Wadsworth Ave. in a pushing pull to go to Columbine. I drove south on Wadsworth Ave until I saw the sea of helicopters then turned East. I had no idea where Columbine High School even was. I worked in the foothills in western Jefferson County and never made it this far south. People were parking on Bowels Ave. typically a very busy street, it was now a parking lot. I got out of the car and walked to Hops a local restaurant. I went into the bar to call my husband to say I would be home late. The place was packed, people were drinking like it was a Friday night not a Tuesday at 3:30pm. This should have been a clue for me to join them. Unfortunately, the thought did not even cross my mind. I wanted to go to Columbine and help. I wanted to help the people hurting there. After leaving Hops I walked to a nearby library. Buses where there to take people to the evacuation center which was Leawood Elementary. I got on awaiting bus and it took off. I had no idea where I was going we rode in silence. I asked someone on the bus if they had heard from Patty the art teacher, the only person that I knew who worked at Columbine. Someone said she was alive. I asked her if I could use her cell phone to call her best friend Brenda. She said sure. She handed me the phone I looked at the phone like it was a foreign object. I had dialed Brenda's number 100 times we had been friends for years. I knew none of her digits. I politely handed the phone back to the lady and swallowed hard. My mind was not my mind but someone elses's. I knew Brenda's number and could dial it with my eye's closed, not today. The bus arrived and we departed into Leawood. As I walked into the school immediately I saw parents looking at pieces of large butcher paper with names hastily scribbled on it. Someone had had a little foresight to ask students to sign the paper before they ran away to safety. As parents found their students names there were sighs of great relief. Their sighs were mixed with stone silence from other families. I started asking the silent families what their students names were and we search the butcher paper for clues to their life. It was very difficult to search and search and not find the names you were so hoping to find. From the amount of names on the paper I knew not every student had signed it. I said to the families not everyone signed, I told them to go home to check in on their children.

This was before cell phones were common. US West had graciously arrived and set up a bank of phones all running out of a single outlet. They had spliced the line and 10 phones on a table were available to anxious callers. Families were frantically on them. Dominoes had donated 30 or more pizza's. The empty boxes were stacked against the wall and scattered on the floor. I got the feeling I was walking into a scene that had been going on for awhile. It was now almost 4pm. The gym was full of families waiting to be reunited with their children. There were a lot of other counselor's in the gym so I did not spend too much time there. The next day on Good Morning America I would see Isaiah Shoels father. He was in the gym the whole time I was at Leawood. The next day on the news he was in the same Dallas Cowboys sports jacket that he was wearing on Tuesday night. Isaiah never got to experience another intoxicating Spring day in Denver.

Next, I went to the main office to try and be useful. There were four lines ringing in, the news was on. They were now saying 25 people were dead. My mouth dropped open. While I gasped I was also partially speaking, “Hello Leawood Elementary can I help you?” I could hear that my voice was not my own. My mind was not my own, my voice was not my own, this day was not my own. I pressed on somehow. With no one telling me what to do I had taken a seat in the Principal's office and began answering a phone that was out of control. I answered questions the best I could with no real knowledge of what was going on. I stayed at this post for hours. At one point I looked up to see our district nurse Betty Fitzpatrick pass by, her face said it all. The horror on her face made me so glad I was sitting at Leawood not at the high school. With no words spoken I could tell that she had just been identifying bodies at the high school. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. She passed by me in silence.

About 9pm the Principal came in and told us to go home. She said they would be having I walked out of Leawood dazed. I had no idea the magnitude of the media that had arrived while I had been on the phone. How did they get to Littleton, CO. so quickly? The district had kept the media to the curb. As I walked out a ciaos of the last few hours. I was not sure I helped anyone while I was at Leawood. I tried. I had not been like the administrators from the district that all lined one wall with their arms folded. All of them had the same stance. “I am here, but I am not doing anything.” They didn't do anything the whole time I was at Leawood. They were not helping parents or answering phones. They were just there. They wouldn't even clean up the Dominoes boxes that littered the floor.

A secretary who had been answering phones with me saw me being questioned by the reporter. She said, “Ride with us.” I said “Okay”. Hitching rides with unfamiliar forms of transportation was becoming easier. Just then her husband pulled up in their SUV. I got in the back door quickly. They drove me back to Bowles Ave. I sat quietly in the back and listened their conversation, it was so honest and without blame. More a stating of facts than feelings. I could tell he was glad to be picking up his wife and taking her safely home. I wished someone was taking me home.

Time had been suspended the last few hours as I got in my car it felt strange to be alone. I finally exhaled for the first time since lunch. I do not remember driving home. When I walked in the house my husband had the TV on. He handed me a list of six or seven people who had called to check on me. I looked at the list and the seriousness of the situation became conscious. I wish I had saved the list.

In the following weeks I returned to Leawood and the neighboring middle school Ken Carl to do follow up counseling work with the students. All of them had been impacted by the tragedy in different yet similar ways. It was heartbreaking to listen to their stories.

I wish after school I gone to the liquor store bought a bottle of top shelf Tequila, ordered a pizza and bread sticks and called it good. I wish I had slowly sipped on my rescue liquid while I watch the unfolding news, rather than being in the eye of the storm. While I was at Leawood we had no idea what was going on outside the walls of the school. We were in a weird vortex of space, time stood still but raced at the same time. Had I watch the Columbine tragedy from my living room rather than from Leawood I would have been a more intact person. Watching from my house would have given me a hangover possibly yet spared my career as a Counselor. Hangover - no career, hangover - no career. It is a cakewalk which one I should have picked. I choose poorly, but with the purest of intentions. I am still regretfully paying for the decision not to drink in safety today.

In the weeks that followed it was hard to maintain. Somehow I managed to finish the year and showed up for work everyday. I had no idea how the events of 4/20/99 would effect me later. Not even a small clue. For me to even have a curiosity clue would have been nice. I thought I had weathered this massively awful storm fairly intact. It was not until June 2011 over twelve years after the massacre that I would learn otherwise. In 2010 I took a leave of absence from Jefferson County Schools to peruse a writing career. I was able to take a one year leave and return to the district. I was interviewing in the spring of 2011 and not finding a school. A friend told me I should asked to be placed at a school. I made one phone call then later in the week I received a call back that I would be placed at Columbine for the 2011-12 school year. I said, “Okay.” I had a feeling this was a bad idea but wanted to be grateful that they had found me job and I thought I would be fine. Time heals all wounds right? What a vicious deception this line is, it should be removed from our vocabulary at once. Time did nothing to heal my wounds time only intensified them.

I walked into Columbine HS for the first time on July 30, 2011 to voices inside my head saying, “You will be okay, you will be okay.” I was not okay. Walking into the main office was a walk into a non optional 4/20 memorial. The first thing I saw was Lauren Townsend's jersey in a well made frame, my heart sank. All of the other 4/20 memorabilia filled the walls. I flashed back to reports of when the shooters stormed through the main office and secretaries had hid under desks and prayed for their lives. I could not shake this intensity. 4/20 memorial. The first thing I saw was Lauren Townsend's jersey in a in a well made frame, my heart sank.

I was greeted by different people, “Hi, Welcome to Columbine.” “Hi. Glad to be here.” I smiled. In my head I heard gun shots, I thought of Mr. Sanders who quietly bleed to death. I looked for the shooters around every corner. How was I ever going to make this work? I had no idea, either good or bad ideas as to how to cross the minefield of thoughts I was flooded with.

I endured at Columbine for 11 sleepless weeks. I was not functioning when I left. When I was there I felt flight or fight everyday when I walked into the main office doors. I walked over the blue and silver Rebel tiled to the floor every morning. This is where the shooting first started. I had no short term memory while at the school, all of my thoughts were tied up in thoughts of safety. I would log every student contact/parent conversation in our Campus Scheduling system to recall later to serve as my memory. I had conversations that I do not remember having. I was receiving a lot of new information with a new job and new school. None of this information actually went into my brain. My brain was gray matter when I was within the walls of Columbine. I could not bring back my mind, I could not feel safe. I could not stop thinking of 4/20. I would leave school, go to a meeting and start to feel better. Then the panic, anxiety and fear would hit me with wave after wave as soon as I reentered the doors. I kept wondering how everyone else was functioning? Then I looked around none of these people even worked for the district in 1999. None of them were a first responded the night of April 20. Maybe they were the lucky ones safety tucked in at home with an arsenal of alcohol. I was without a net, without a memory and reeling from one day to the next. The entire time I worked at Columbine someone in my family or myself was sick. Working or trying to work all day then going home to care for ill children was overwhelming. But not as bad as when I finally came down with the house hold illness. I dragged myself to work and only took one day off. I lived my life in 24 hour increments it was pure survival.

I had heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had read about it, worked with students who had it. I thought I understood it. When I was on the other side of the disorder it was a completely different story. It makes functioning impossible. It make working impossible. New information that one meets with everyday bounces off one self not leaving any mark that the information was even presented. I knew I had to leave. I did not want to let the students, staff and school community down. I had enough sick days to call in sick for several months. I felt like this was wrong. Even though I was waking up at 3:00am every night in full on terror of the next day. I would not go back to sleep but anxiously lay awake waiting for yet another day when I got to cross the Rebel on the floor and reenter the Hell zone. By Wednesday the sleep derivation plus the PTSD made the end of the week nothing short of horrendous.

I left Columbine in October 2011. I had nightmares until April the next year. Once the nightmares ceased I began looking for another school counseling job. I am still looking for a job. I have heard more times than I can count, “Thank you for your interest in the school counseling position. We have chosen a different candidate. Best of luck in your job search.” There is no luck out there for me. There is however massive opportunities to be unemployed or underemployed. Had I not been a first responder I would not have had a traumatic reaction to working at Columbine. Had I not been a first responder I would still have a career. Had I not been a first reponder I would not be working seven days as week. Had I not been a first responder my children would be able to attend College. I will always remember the Tequila I did not ingest and regret profoundly that Columbine happened and that I was willingly a part of it.