I'm Not Crying, It's My Allergies!

I'm reading "The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb. I wasn't going to comment on it until I finished it, but it's breaking my heart.

It's fiction, but the main characters are a husband and wife. The husband is a language arts teacher at Columbine H.S. and his wife is one of the school nurses.

The Columbine shootings happened on April 20, 1999. This was about 8 months after Don died and I wasn't watching any news during this time. The whole Bill and Monica thing is lost on me. Another staff from school called me to tell me about Columbine. I did turn on the news to see, but only for a minute or two. I couldn't watch the trauma nor could I watch the vultures in the media. So I've known about the general event, but not many details.

Until this book. Yes, the character's experiences are fictional, but they could so easily be the truth. And Wally Lamb is such a good writer. It's a well known fact I don't cry easily at movies. I've never cried reading a book. Not even Time Traveler's Wife. This book is making me cry and I can't even think about it during the day without going there. So I try not to think about it during the day even though the characters are written so you want to think about them and wonder what's happening to them when you're not there.

I think another reason why this is getting to me is, again, the writing. Wally Lamb does such a good job of building the time and environment of the story that it takes me right back to that time.

And that time is here again. 11 years this Labor Day weekend.