ANTHOLOGY OF UNRELENTING WOE

School shooting survivors speak out in a new book. Their pain is terrible – and vital – to hear

IF I DON’T MAKE IT, I LOVE YOU: SURVIVORS IN THE AFTERMATH OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS Edited by Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman

MANY books have analysed school shootings. If I Don’t Make It, I Love You records them, in the words of those who lived through them: the parents and friends of those killed, those who ran from bullets they struggle to forget. There are more than 60 voices, beginning with that of Fred

Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February last year. “I think about her final seconds every day of my life,” he writes. “But I’ve learned so much about myself since her death. I’m strong and resilient.

And I learned the same is true for those affected by gun violence.”

In this shattering collection, we learn how true that is, and yet how difficult it can be to summon that strength. Survivors confess a variety of responses to mass shootings: Some speak of laughter when they ought to have panicked, numbness when they ought to have wept, lingering fear in the absence of anything to be afraid of. They feel shame, anger and grief in strange proportions, and helpless.

“The weight of this felt unbearable,” Josh Stepakoff writes of his life since being shot at age 6 at his California day camp 20 years ago. “If you learn one thing from me, learn that your life belongs to you and no one else.”

The anthology of woe offers a modicum of succour and hope to anyone interested in learning how gun violence is affecting the nation. That the book is uneven and sometimes unpolished reflects the roughness of the experiences.

Editors Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman sew themselves into the fabric of the anthology, with a page or two of introduction to each essay and sometimes personal anecdotes.

About the Sandy Hook shooting, Archer writes of her children being the same age as many of the victims: “I remember thinking (my daughter) should not associate first grade with murder.”

The book begins with the most recent shootings, moving back in time to the 1966 University of Texas at Austin tower sniper. This structure is well-considered. It demonstrates the long-term impact of trauma, transitioning slowly from survivors who are just a few months out to those who have had decades to work through their experiences. It also shows, nakedly, how school shootings have increased in frequency and deadliness from the 1990s to today, and how a particular kind of school shooting has become de rigueur.

Before about 1997, shootings were few and far between, and they could be explained as flukes: people with undiagnosed schizophrenia, people with grievances, bigots with nothing to lose. But after the shooting at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1997, a pattern began to form.

Kids with excess hate and access to guns showed up at school and fired indiscriminately. After Columbine, the pattern was set, and experts designed a response protocol. The book shows how the protocol fails to account for the emotional reactions of survivors and loved ones – what happens to kids who are told to walk out of school with their hands on their heads, and elementary school pupils who learn how to hide under their desks, in closets or behind barricaded doors.

Again and again, survivors tell individual versions of the same story: A boy came in, he killed some of us, we don’t know why and now I will always be afraid.

Some place blame on institutions or individuals, while others explain their paths to forgiveness and healing. Jane Nicholson, the wife of a professor killed at the University of Iowa in 1991, writes: “A bullet makes a straight-line trajectory, grief makes a circle.”

Some write poems or draw graphic stories; some rely on photographs or tweets to tell the tale; still others speak in interviews with Archer and Kleinman or write letters to their murdered loved ones. The variation in the stories lies on the surface. Fear, violence, loss, and the bright line between life before the shooting and life after the shooting – the qualities all run bone-deep, and the survivors express them again and again. “My moments of silence in my backyard became torture,” writes Mona Samaha, the mother of a student killed at Virginia Tech, speaking for many others. “I felt fear instead of peace.”

The repetition of the book is depressing. The events described are horrible; over and over, they are more so. Some survivors write about joining Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, while others pursue healing and help in more individual ways. Columbine survivors have founded private groups to support school shooting survivors, and they reach out after every new incident.

But survivors from pre-2000 shootings say they had no notion of where to turn or what to do.

“Every time I went to a counsellor, I was told they had no idea how to help me,” says Christina Hadley Ellegood, who survived the Paducah shooting but whose sister did not. “There was no one else like me in America.”

The purpose of If I Don’t Make It,

I Love You is clear: to compile and tell these stories. That’s an important, even necessary endeavour. In the pages, hope comes in tiny measures, and suffering overwhelms. It would be an understatement to say that opening a chest of horrors like this one is difficult. Open it anyway.