Yesterday, I had the somber privilege of delivering the keynote speech at a Columbine memorial event organized and hosted by Indivisible 41, March for Our Lives, and Brady United to Prevent Gun Violence. We gathered outside the Riverside Main Library.

What follows is the text of my remarks.

Memorial Speech, Twenty Years After Columbine

“In grief nothing stays put,” the author CS Lewis writes. “One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats.”

Lewis goes on to ask, “How often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time.”

We know that inevitable grief itself is astonishment enough, made only worse when our families and communities are shattered by violence.

We have gathered today for a solemn remembrance. It is right that we are here together. It is also right to say, after twenty years, that we should not have to be here to demand that this cycle be broken.

As individuals, as community members and citizens, we always face a real-time conflict between honoring memory and forgetting– even denying–the past. But we are standing on these steps on a spring morning because we know remembering matters, especially when the worst happens. Especially when our hope for refuge has been damaged, or the idea of sanctuary has been forever changed.

We do not need to be bystanders, standing by passively. We can be people who re-member, people who heal—who reach out, who rise UP, who stand FOR each other.

We cannot do this work alone. We have learned over and over again how decency gets discouraged or destroyed.

We have too often witnessed, and experienced, the callous disregard that stomps its feet, sneers at justice, brandishes a torch or a bomb or an automatic rifle in the face of the future. We have seen the disregard that perverts strength into a performance of domination and murder.

We must acknowledge the attention and energy required–even demanded–for us to make goodness grow. We must be steady as we sustain this work and ourselves and each other.

Today is an opportunity to remind ourselves that there are too many of us who never feel safe at school, or in church, in the workplace, or on the street.

We must recognize that for too many Americans there is no “home,” and for too many of our neighbors, home itself may be the least safe place to be.

We have to listen differently in the long game.

In a few moments, we will hear the names of the 13 victims killed on that terrifying day twenty years ago at Columbine High School. The youngest victim would be 34 years old this year. The oldest would be 67.

After each name, you will hear a bell. As you meditate on these lives lost, I urge you to consider that for every name, there is a ripple of other names attached to them: the family members and friends of each victim; the injured who survived with their own wounds; the witnesses; the first responders; the family of the shooters themselves; that child, or parent, or teacher, or friend you were when you first saw the horrifying news on television.

I urge you to think also of those in our own city who have been lost to violent death, whether in private or in public.

Survivors of any crime know that the sensational worst is always followed by a lonely after—moments of the mind and the heart over years, over decades, that don’t make TV or Twitter, moments that may not translate into language at all, and for which there are never any ceremonies.

Remembrance matters because it demands that we re-see what happened before alongside what we have learned and what we are trying to un-learn. We see what we love alongside the better imprint we want to leave.

In her poem, “The Seventh Sense,” Audre Lorde writes,

Women

who build nations

learn

to love

men

who build nations

learn

to love

children

building sand castles

by the rising sea.

Remembrance need not be futile or despondent if we can be brave together, if we can respect how strength and tenderness must always be partners. Together, we can build a world where voices rather than bullets are the shared currency.