›› Time, as it turns out, does not heal all wounds.
One year after James Holmes unleashed a new kind of horror on Aurora when he killed 12 people and physically maimed dozens more in the Century 16 theater shooting, the pain and terror remain just under the surface. At least for me.
Time, as it turns out, heals some wounds and dampens the raw, crazy pain. It does not heal. I first realized that in February during a journalism conference. I was on a panel focusing on how newsrooms handle disaster stories. Sadly, Colorado newsrooms had a lot of experience with calamity last year. Massive fires turned a host of Colorado newspapers and TV stations into something akin to war rooms. My peer editors in February talked about grueling hours, information blockades, unrelenting tension and in some cases, fear. Colorado journalists are a storied lot. There were tales about covering international coups, earthquakes, floods, all the events that make journalist hearts quicken and people draw near.
I knew the drill. In the almost 30 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve had too many occasions to wallow in the funk of death. Traffic deaths. Shooting deaths. Deaths from disease. Death from weird accidents. Deaths from war. The stench of death hangs on people and places like mildew. It never ceases to be offensive or less shocking. In time, it fades but never completely goes away. It’s like a show. And journalism is in so many ways like acting. I couldn’t possibly pose questions to the parent who’s lost their son in battle — for the sake of a story. But I have often portrayed a reporter who could and did. Many times I have been too horrified to focus on the details of a calamity and write a story or flesh out details, like with the Chuck E. Cheese’s shootings, or the 1998 Labor Day massacre and the Columbine massacre. But I have on many occasions played a journalist who did just that. I’ve raced around death unfazed to make changes in style, in fact, in time. Sometimes, after playing the part of the unruffled reporter, I’ve made morbid jokes about the situation or simply looked past the grisly reality, only to toss around tough talk later on.
While July 20 was like nothing I’ve ever encountered in so many ways, it was hardly the first or worst horror mankind has unleashed upon itself. The shocking proximity and sheer gruesomeness of the massacre came close to being overwhelming, but it wasn’t. The newsroom that day wasn’t a cacophony of commands and movie cliches. It was fearsomely silent. With clenched jaws and darting eyes, we scrambled to relay layers of horror as they unfolded at the theater, Holmes’ apartment and his former school. Despite the complexity of covering the event, the chaos, the magnitude of the horror, the freaking, endlessly ringing phones, we all stayed in character. In my opinion we gave flawless performances of journalists under the gun.
No doubt we all carried off mountains of anguish from the task of wallowing in the stench of so much atrocity and death for so long, but relief in the form of a few stolen sobs, some deep breaths, a little restless sleep made the show possible.
And then the days went by. Victims’ stories turned into obituaries. Then weeks went by and the details about guns, insanity, donations and the crime scene turned into another court story. Time, so it seemed, had grown over the raw fear and pain from my role as a newspaper editor. I was healed.
So I was taken aback when I picked up my cue at the conference and launched into my lines about what happened in Aurora, in our newsroom. Without warning, it was July 20 again. It was kids we knew crawling away from a ferocious gunman across dead bodies and pools of blood in a theater just steps from my office. It was cops I knew who dragged dying kids the same age as my daughter to chaotic emergency rooms in a scene reserved for wars or terrorist attacks. It was too much, too close, too fast.
I couldn’t stay in character, and I had to frequently stop talking to keep it together as I relayed the oppressive grief, anger and horror each of us here endured for days. Even as I write this, I still can’t play the part. I don’t want to.
I can’t tell you how disheartening it’s been to discover that my fail safe, one that I think we’ve all counted on, is a myth. Time does not heal all wounds. Not this one. Not yet.