(Page 3)
One day in spring 1997, about three months after Cassie had transferred to the Christian school, she came home and told us that Jamie had invited her to a church-sponsored weekend youth retreat. I'll let Jamie tell the story, which I didn't hear until about six weeks after Cassie's death.
"The theme of the weekend was overcoming the temptations of evil and breaking out of the selfish life. There was a nighttime service, and it was the singing that for some reason broke down Cassie's walls. A lot of kids had been bringing things up to the altar -drug paraphernalia and stuff like that; they were breaking off their old bonds. Cassie didn't have anything to bring up to the altar, but she was pouring out all these things that she felt bad about and wanting to give them all up. I think she was asking God for forgiveness. Later I noticed that her whole face had changed. You looked at her, and even though she was still shy, it was like her eyes were more hopeful."
At the end of that weekend, Brad and I went to pick up Cassie. She came straight over to me, hugged me, then looked me in the eye and said, "Mom, I've totally changed. I know you are not going to believe it, but I'll prove it to you."
In the school essay, she wrote almost two years later, Cassie recalled: "...on a retreat with Jamie and her church, I turned my life around. I was really able to see where I had gone astray. I had made bad choices, and there was nobody to blame but myself -something I had denied constantly throughout my suffering."
I was highly skeptical, but it really seemed to be true. From then on, her eyes were bright, she smiled again like she hadn't for years, and she began to treat us (and her brother, Chris, 15) with genuine respect and affection.
At the end of the summer of 1997, Brad and I allowed Cassie to transfer to Columbine High, where a good friend had transferred earlier.
She had no noteworthy problems in the last two years of her life. She fretted about her weight and her looks, she worried about getting along with other kids at school and church, and she butted heads now and then with her younger brother, her father or me. Remembers Jamie, "Cassie said that sometimes she felt like her parents didn't care about her as a person, but just about what she did or maybe how she reflected on them as parents. It was a struggle for her to see that her parents really did care for her."
Most classmates at Columbine say Cassie didn't draw attention to herself by talking about her faith. One of them, Kayla, told us, "She was nice to everyone at school, and she never judged someone for how they dressed or looked. I only found out that she was religious after she was killed."
Within a day of the shooting, people began calling Cassie "the martyr of Littleton." Cassie is my daughter, I thought. You can't turn her into a Joan of Arc. Before she was a martyr, she was a teen.
I'm not belitting her bravery. I'm profoundly proud of her for refusing to cave in and for saying yes to her killers, and I always will be. She had principles and morals, and she was not ashamed of them, even though it must have taken all the courage she could muster to hold fast. When I first heard what she had done, I wondered, "Would I have done that?" Cassie didn't. She may have been 17, but she's a far stronger woman that I'll ever be.
 |
Click left arrow for Page 2 of this article |
| Back to Columbine Main |
