To walk through Columbine High School today is to be struck by the apparent normality of it all. Students greet each other between classes. A teacher jokes with a group of girls and boys in the hall. Band members tote instruments to practice. It's almost as if the shootings of April 20, 1999, had never happened.

But the cheerful ordinariness that prevails on the surface masks a painful paradox: Though the school and the community are gradually returning to normal, they will never, on one level, be "normal" in people's minds again. The name "Columbine" will always signal more than the name of a high school. And those who lived through the killing cannot deny to themselves that their lives have been forever changed, reorganized around tragedy and loss.

That was written in the summer of the year 2000, during my regular visits to Littleton. I was welcomed by the principal and other Columbine administrators because we met earlier at a conference convened by the FBI, came to know and trust each other as we discussed the motives and methods of American school shooters, and as we struggled to find ways to help those responsible for restoring confidence to survivors of such harrowing tragedies.

I'm a psychiatrist who deals with these issues, be they the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka, a Delta Connection plane crash in my native Michigan, or the needs of our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Additionally, I have come to know and respect the journalists who cover trauma. Journalists are first responders, too, and they suffer from exposure to trauma and tragedy.

Dave Cullen and I met in 1999 in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine massacre and have become good friends. I like his book for its honesty, clarity, and unembellished portrait of strong personalities. His observations seem on target to me, and they have enriched my insights, although I was also there as a direct witness to Columbine's suffering and recovery.

Assistant principal Chris Mikesell still has upsetting lapses of concentration. "I got back from vacation, and what did I do?" she recalls with exasperation. "I drove right into my son's car!" She is distressed by the holes in her memory of the day that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold strode into the school and started shooting. A former math teacher, Mikesell had always specialized in logic and deliberation. Now she struggles with a disturbing sense of diminished control over life.

For more than a year, I have worked with survivors of the shootings at the Littleton, Colo., high school that left 14 teenagers (including the two killers) and one teacher dead, and many others wounded. I have seen Columbine struggling to recover from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--the disorder most associated with survivors of war--and the shame and blame that attach to the profoundly wounding trauma the community suffered.

The problem is particularly acute for school officials, who were powerless to prevent the murder of children whom it was their responsibility to care for and protect. Though it probably would be best for many of them to leave the school and take positions elsewhere, only one member of the school's top administrative team has done so. Most of the staff members cling to their posts out of mixed feelings of obligation, loyalty and guilt that weigh heavily and slow their recovery.

When I visited I would often stay at the home of Chris Mikesell and her husband, Carl. We would invite other Columbine assistant principals over for snacks and informal conversation. These were not psychiatric sessions or group therapy, but they did become quite candid --and supportive. My role was never formalized. I suppose I was something of an uncle from out-of-town who served as an excuse for a family gathering at a time when the family needed a chance to step back from itself, catch its collective breath, and feel its kinship in a positive way.
These assistant principals felt like parents of murdered children. I had ministered to my local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children. it was familiar ground.

Of course I knew I was a participant in a piece of American history. Despicably, that is what Harris and Klebold set out to create: a monument to their own terrible quest for notoriety. They did achieve that end. There were certainly times when all of us who participated as teachers or reporters or doctors wished we could avoid publicity. But there were more times when we wished that a curious public would get the facts straight, would learn from tragic mistakes, and would recognize that recovery from a notorious collective trauma takes place in small, human steps.

Dave Cullen wrote a book to make the Columbine tragedy comprehensible. He had to explore the motives and behaviors of the killers. He had to contend with polarizing and pontificating personalities in the community. I believe he wishes he could have spent more time with those who took me into their homes as they sought to re-humanize a school and community that not only suffered, but was turned into a symbol of tragedy for the rest of America.

Barbara Monseu, who was area administrator of Jefferson County schools at the time of the shootings, was in the "on scene" command center near Columbine that day, helping to coordinate the evacuation of students and establish contact points for anguished parents. Afterward, she visited Columbine High School nearly every day until she passed the baton to Sally Blanchard last December. In that aftermath period, she said, "There were so many times when personal tragedies affected us." She recalled how one of the parents on a committee to plan memorial services often brought her baby girl to meetings. The baby was a source of joy in otherwise somber discussions about memorials, anniversaries and policy changes associated with the trauma. "Sarah went everywhere that Ann went, and we all became very close," Monseu said. "Then baby Sarah died suddenly from a rare infection. It was devastating." This personal loss would have been keenly felt under any circumstances, but in the context of the shootings, it was almost overwhelming, reverberating in the echo chamber Columbine has become--and may likely remain--in these people's lives.

Now it is ten years later. My recollections are muted with time. I don't think much about the perpetrators or the bloviators. Frankly, I have very warm feelings about the faculty who had to return and run a school, who loved those kids, and who had their own, personal stories all wrapped up in a national spectacle:

One day, Mikesell took me to the cemetery. First we stood by the crosses memorializing the students who had been killed. Then she led me to the graveside of slain teacher Dave Sanders. A few yards away, a small tombstone marked the grave of Mikesell's son, a little boy who had had seven operations on a malformed heart. I looked at the dates carved on his stone: 1982-1984. Long before Columbine. Long before anyone could have dreamed a Columbine would or could happen. Chris's little boy's short life hadn't had anything to do with that. But as I watched her gaze at his
grave, I knew that, for her, his death would be forever a part of the trauma she knows as Columbine.