Letter to Columbine

Columbine High School


April 21, 2000


Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff:

In 1992, I was a sophomore in high school. During that year, I encountered my first experience with the death of a teenager. The death of a teenager is not an easily reconciled matter, especially if it was someone you knew and loved. Many teenagers have yet to learn that success comes only after failure. They have yet to learn that reality comes only after dreams. It’s a terrible crime for this wisdom to be undiscovered, for life’s lessons to be unlearned, for a promising future to be unrealized.

My experience with the death of a teenager was not only a tragedy; it was also a crime. At the time, I had no one to turn to for advice, no one with whom to share my frustrations. I was convinced I was strong enough that I didn’t need help from anyone, if they didn’t care enough to ask me if I was okay. At first, I hated the killer with all of my soul. My friends and family members kept telling me, “It’s okay. Life goes on. Get over it.” But somehow, those practiced lines didn’t do anything to help me. How could moving on be the right thing? How could it be right to continue living life when not everyone can? How could it be good to think only of myself and not of the deceased every second of every day? I didn’t understand it, so I retained all of my anger, frustration, and resentment, along with my fear of death and all of my hatred.

Eventually, my hatred grew from a general longing for revenge into a violent hatred for the entire world. From this, it evolved into a combination of all of these with the added pain of an intense self-hatred. I lived with all this hatred day in and day out until it consumed me entirely. My hatred took over my life and made me into someone I still can’t recognize as myself. The hatred made me intensely self-defeating and self-destructive until my body could no longer handle the stress. I started experiencing episodes where I would completely lose control of my mind and body. I wouldn’t know who I was or where I was, and these episodes (I found out later they were panic attacks) progressively worsened until the tiniest little upset would aggravate me so much that I could barely breathe.

The collapse of my physical being as a result of my hatred proved only to make me hate everything even more. I was so sure I was handling things the best I could, and I was still having problems. After seven years of silent inner torture, I ended up needing immediate hospitalization for my breathing and my doctors started me on intensive therapy and heavy psychiatric medication. Once my pain started being released, I found myself with an unusually large collection of journal entries, in which I felt I could logically explain and possibly even defend the actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on April 20, 1999. In order to gain credibility in my statements about the killers, I began researching everything about the infamous massacre. The more research I did, the more interested I became in Columbine. My interest continued until I had a huge number of journal entries which included all my thoughts about Columbine and my opinions about where the thoughts of killers might originate. I gathered all of these journal entries into a book and began promoting myself as a supporter of these two killers.

As the one year anniversary of the shooting approached, somehow I knew I had to be in attendance for the memorial events. I traveled all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, against the wishes of every single person I know, to attend the ceremony in Clement Park on April 20, 2000. I don’t know what I expected to encounter in Littleton, but it wasn’t what I got. From all the way at the back of the crowd, I listened to every word of every speaker and every song. I sat on the grass with my head in my hands, hiding behind the hair that fell over my face, pondering why I had come. Some of the speakers made inside jokes and talked about students and teachers I didn’t know, and I felt as though I was partly intruding on their personal affairs and partly like I was justified in being there after having lived with so much pain. I have been so unhappy for so long that I knew I could offer an unconditional support and love for the community, even though I had originally praised the killers, the very reason we were all there in the first place. I can’t pretend to comprehend the emotional ordeal of being a student or faculty member at Columbine last April, but I felt proud to be at the anniversary, offering my sincerest condolences and sympathies for all of the surviving victims.

While I sat on the grass beneath the broad, Colorado sky, I let the words of the speakers course through me like the spiritual renewal of faith in the goodness of humanity. The speaker whose words touched me most was Patti Nielson. After apologizing to the crowd for taking everyone back to that horrible day, Patti Nielson shared the thoughts that had run through her head while she hid in a cupboard for hours, convinced she was going to die. She said she thought of her husband and children, her parents and students. The comment she made that really struck me was that she hoped her children could lead happy lives even without her, and she hoped their loss wouldn’t fill them with anger, hatred, and self-pity for the rest of their lives. Essentially, she didn’t want her children to turn into killers, slaves to hatred like Dylan and Eric, although those two names were never mentioned. Her passionate speech made me reconsider my entire outlook on life.

The overall tone of the afternoon was so positive that I could barely believe it. Several months ago, that would’ve made me extremely angry. I don’t like moving on. The idea of moving on has always offended me. To me, “moving on” has always been synonymous with “forgetting,” but these students weren’t forgetting. These students were remembering without being sappy. They took the situation seriously and put their arms around one another while they reminisced about their fallen comrades and laughed at the stupidity of the media. They must’ve had some outstanding counselors to help them. I’m sure there are those students who can’t move on and haven’t let go of their anger, but the majority of the community seemed to be recovering nicely.

I wonder about the minority, though: where they were, who they are. I feel that their community helped me by being supportive and understanding. I am deeply grateful that they didn’t shove me away from their personal ordeal to depart with all my suffering, anger, frustration, and hopelessness still intact. I’m sure there exists an individual or two or more who hates the community now more than ever for trying to accept that their friend or friends are gone forever, and for those few who believe they can handle the pain on their own in their own time, I want to cry. I want to tell them that it’s okay to find help and ask for help, and it really is the asking that’s the hardest part. I want to tell them that the pain won’t just go away by itself. The pain doesn’t ease with time alone. For now, though, I think it’s my time to move on. The ceremony and the strength I witnessed in Clement Park provided for me the time for remorse, the attention to pain and death that I have always needed. The ceremony was the funeral to replace all of the funerals I should’ve attended at several points earlier in my life, but I didn’t know then if I could handle it. This ceremony was my church, my time to pray for hope in the only way I know how: to be silent amidst anguish, to feel as though I can sympathize, and to know I have something to give.

I must admit, one of my objectives in visiting Littleton was to locate the graves of the killers and to pay homage to two souls who actually did what I had only dreamt of doing for years and years. It was in Littleton Cemetery that I began the search for their graves, when I encountered three teenage girls gathered around the grave of Lauren Townsend. Impressed with my luck in having found at least the grave of a victim, I started walking towards the three girls with my camera. Somewhere in the middle of my journey to the grave, however, I suddenly realized it was horribly disrespectful for me to make a tourist attraction out of a grave site, so my approach slowed. When I finally approached the grave, I knelt on the grass behind the girls, whereupon they very shyly and sincerely turned to smile and say, “Hi.” I know it seems silly, but it’s extremely uncommon to receive such a friendly welcome from a complete stranger in Boston, so I was moved by their kindness and their immediate acceptance of me. I said, “Hi,” and smiled in response, happily acknowledging that not all people should be the objects of my hatred. Then I asked them if they would mind me taking a picture. They all said it was okay and they started to stand up, but I told them they didn’t have to move, and I took the picture with them in it. After snapping the photo, I sat down on the grave site behind the three girls for a few minutes, and wondered again how these high school students got to be so strong. I sat quietly and tried to pay my respects by acknowledging all of the victims this time, not just the injured and killed, not just the families and friends, not just Eric and Dylan, but everyone who has been touched in any way by the suffering wrought on Columbine High. My thoughts shifted to memories of deceased friends of mine, and all I could do was stare at the grass and contemplate all the time I have wasted with hatred.

Now, as I sit in the plane on my way back to Boston, it hits me. The incredible strength I witnessed in Clement Park and Littleton Cemetery was what I have been missing for the last several years of my life. The support between members of the Littleton community has left me with an overwhelming feeling of hope for the future of Columbine, the nation, and myself. It is with a renewed sense of hope and an unshakable feeling of indebted gratitude to the people of Littleton that I return to Boston. I hope to reach the three girls in the enclosed picture and thank them for their strength and their kindness. I’d also like to thank the rest of Columbine High School for making my life a little more bearable. On this trip, I learned several lessons. Most importantly, though, I learned that hope comes only with togetherness and sometimes love comes only after hate.

Thank you and best of luck to all.


Sincerely,


Krista Lester