  Today Sean Fitzpatrick will have celebrated his seventeenth birthday. And he can’t even enunciate words, eat, and is barely able to drink mild liquids. I’ve been trying to think of a way to update my blog in respect to Sean. In all honesty, there have been many occasions were I have wanted to write about it. But the thing with writing, particularly prose, is that it forces you to organize your thoughts. It makes things final and very real. I don’t want to think about what happened this fall. I don’t want it to be real.
Tonight, after the weekly movie-and-coffee Leigh and I share, we looked at an article in The Inlander about the incident on September 22. It triggered a need to suddenly write, write, write. In the last few weeks, there has been a petition around school for Sean’s charges. He was only sixteen-- my age-- when he brought that gun to school. I proudly signed in agreement that he should be tried as a minor. Because that is what he is. It appears that the prosecutor wants to charge him as an adult. That means up to thirty years in prison.
Think about that. Sean was a boy who never really lived life, a boy who wandered around without a trace of hope in his heart. He was detached from school and family. He had no friends. He was desperate to end it all, no matter what the cost. The article said in the ambulance he tried to pull out the cords and wires that were keeping him alive. He tried this other times at the hospital long after. And now that he is finally getting the proper help that he needs, now they want to interlude.
They want to put him away until he is middle-aged. I know that Sean needs to be punished. When I think about that day, and what could have possibly happened, I cry. The confusion . I knew Leigh was somewhere on the third floor, in a classroom making up a test. To think that she could have died. My reluctance to leave the floor . I took my sweet time standing up and voicing what an inconvenience it was to move. The shots we heard . The fact that while I was sipping my soda, Sean was planning to take his life literally feet away from me. I remember the evacuation. I remember Alyson’s pale face, her words and their weight. Looking for Leigh.
That teacher with the look to terror in his eyes, hugging me and telling me things would be okay. And then I think about the SWAT team, watching men in helmets trample out and race up the stairs I had gone up that morning. And then there were the news crews all over school the next morning. Their audacity. Zero hour was cancelled that morning. People hugging, people crying. Some indifferent. In the last few months, I have tried to reconcile myself to what happened.
In one light, I could have died. But I didn’t . No one did. And although I realize that the eventual fate of all our lives is death, in an odd way, Sean made my life more hopeful. Yes, I sound cliché and naïve and silly. But my point is the same point hundred of movie-of-the-weeks and “compelling” melodramas have made abundantly clear; life is meant to be cherished . It sucks sometimes, and the weight of it all can be crushing. But it is our ability to come out unscathed, or relatively so, that makes the good part of life so good. If I had never suffered through a terrible synth ditty with bad lyrics, I wouldn’t enjoy that indescribable rush of a favorite song. If I had never experienced loneliness, I wouldn’t understand the power of friendship. And if I had never been close to death, I wouldn’t appreciate life in this way. Happy birthday, Sean. I hope there are many more birthdays to come. Affectionately… Anna 
