Watching the Oscar-winning documentary All the Empty Rooms brought me right back to when I was standing in Christopher’s room, a year after he was killed in a mass shooting. I was there with his mom, Sandi, interviewing her for my book Beyond the Bullet—about his life, his death, and what it’s like to mourn an only child who was taken so violently.
Before the interview, Sandi invited me to see Christopher’s room—his empty room. We walked down the stairs, past family photos lining the wall, to the end of the dark hallway where light spilled from his room. As she stepped inside, she said quietly, “I haven’t turned his light off since he died,” and then she sprayed a small bottle of his musky and slightly sweet cologne into the center of the room. As she took a big deep breath to inhale his scent, she closed her eyes. Her anguish was palpable.
After Sandi showed me Christopher’s room, we sat together on her back porch to record our conversation. After just a couple of questions, she began to weep and then to sob, so much so that I couldn’t understand her. I began to worry I was harming her.
When Sandi finished her story, in between sobs, about finding out at the funeral that Christopher had been secretly helping homeless teens who lived under a busy highway overpass, I reached over to the recorder and turned it off.
“I feel like I’m retraumatizing you,” I said, “and it’s totally not worth it if I’m causing you even more harm. I think we should stop.”
Her demeanor changed instantaneously: She sat up straight in her metal chair, her eyes pleading. “Oh no!” she exclaimed. “You’re not hurting me—just the opposite. I never get to tell my entire story. I go to support groups, and I talk for like ten minutes and then have to stop and let someone else go. This is the first time I’ve been able to tell my story, out loud, from the beginning to the end. Please don’t stop.”
So we continued on—her sobbing, me listening and asking questions about Christopher, their relationship, and his death. As the interview wrapped up, I was filled with a sense of connection and purpose. I felt an intimacy with her as she shared the details of her pain, her anguish, and her regrets as a mother.
As I watched All the Empty Rooms, I couldn’t help but feel a kinship with Steve Hartman, the narrator. Near the end he said, “I feel like I’ve done nothing but take, you know? We took pictures. We took their time.”
I too couldn’t shake the feeling that I was taking from those I interviewed—or worse, retraumatizing them. After all, I was asking strangers to tell me the details of the worst day of their lives. It felt nosy. It felt intrusive.
But that’s the thing. Doing this kind of work changes you. You see gun violence in a different way, a deeper way, a more connected way. Steve said it well: “When I hear about a school shooting, I know that room is out there. I feel like I can place myself in the room and it hurts a lot more than it did before.” And that’s a good thing.
The work I’ve done around gun violence, the work I write about in my book, Dumb Girl, has made me more empathetic, more thoughtful, and a better advocate. I’ll forever be grateful to all of those who have let me into their homes, into their lives, and shared their unbearable pain so that the people who read my books and articles, and watch my film, can better understand the real impact of gun violence.
All the Empty Rooms is streaming on Netflix. I highly recommend it.
