Not Evergreen. Not Again.

A shooting reopens old wounds and binds us in collective grief.

Not Evergreen. Not Again.

A school shooting reopens old wounds and binds us in collective grief.

I felt my phone buzz in my pocket in the dark movie theater. Potential spam again? But then I glanced at my watch: my best friend. She rarely calls this time of day. My stomach tightened. Another buzz. And another. I know this nudge. I know this feeling.

It’s grief.

We left the theater before the show was over. As soon as I saw the headline, my body went stiff. My throat constricted, my stomach clenched, my heart felt hard to move. Shooting at Evergreen High School. No. Not here. Not Evergreen.

There was never a shooting at my school while I was there—I graduated before Columbine. But we were no strangers to grief at EHS. We lost classmates. We lost friends. We lost my brother.

Grief back then was a prison. After Ben died, I remember walking into his room, sitting on his messy bed, picking up the book he’d been reading that morning—The Iliad. I’ve never been able to open it since. I stared at the shirt woven into his sheets, trying to wrap my mind around what dead meant. What never meant.

When I returned to school a week later, it felt like the whole building had taken a sharp breath and never let it out. The walls didn’t breathe. The halls constricted. People whispered, That’s the girl whose brother died, but no one spoke to me. The silence was suffocating. I lost more than my brother that day; I lost a place to belong.

I was terrified to speak my pain, to admit that I was not okay, that we as a family were not okay. So I performed. I smiled. I spent all my energy proving I was fine. Looking back, I wonder: what if I had used that same energy to allow myself to not be okay? What if I had let myself fall apart, and been met in the pieces?

I didn’t take a full breath again until I was 35—almost 20 years later—when I stood in a room of strangers and finally said out loud the shame I had carried: that I thought it was my fault, because we had fought that day. When the words came, it was like gasping for air after drowning. My body shook, my lungs filled, and I finally cried. The room cried with me. They didn’t fix it. They didn’t run. They allowed it.

That’s what grief needs: not pity, not silence, but presence. Not I don’t want to be where you are, but I will sit with you here.

Evergreen, my heart is with you. With the students walking those halls, the teachers returning to classrooms they’ll never see the same way, the parents holding their breath waiting for their kids to come home. My heart is with every alum who saw the headline and felt their own stomach drop.

You can’t hide from grief—you can only delay it. It will find you. So please: slow down. Ask yourself what’s in your heart. Take a walk. Curl up in a blanket. Draw. Cry. Write. Call someone. Tell them you love them. Check in on the person you can’t stop thinking about.

Can we give Evergreen permission to not be okay? Can we give ourselves that permission too? To stop the efforting, the performing, the pretending. To hurt. To ache. To fall apart—and then to reach out and be held.

This is how we heal. This is how we make it different. We stop. We breathe. We feel it. We fall apart. And we come together.

Evergreen, we’ve got you.