The Quiet Room

By Jordan Matt-Zeitler

I used to think the worst thing that could happen to a parent was losing their child. I was wrong.

The worst thing is losing your child and knowing they took other people with them.

The phone call came at 11:17 a.m. I was at work, writing an email about supply orders when the words stopped making sense on the screen. “There’s been a shooting at Franklin High. Multiple fatalities. Your son—Eli—he…"

I don’t remember the rest. Just the sound of my own heartbeat hammering in my ears. And then the silence. Not outside—sirens were screaming, and phones were buzzing—but inside me. A kind of stunned, frozen quiet that still hasn’t left.

They told me Eli was dead. That he had taken his own life after killing four students and a teacher. I sat down on the floor of my office and did not get up for hours. No one came to help me. I didn’t expect them to.

My house became a crime scene. They took everything: his computer, his notebooks, the video game console, even the shoebox of birthday cards under his bed. I wasn’t allowed to sleep in my own home for a week. When I returned, the air felt foreign. As if grief and violence had soaked into the drywall.

I found one of his drawings still pinned to the fridge—left behind, maybe out of mercy. A sketch of a treehouse he wanted to build someday. “Escape Hatch,” he’d labeled it. I stared at it for hours. I still do sometimes.

They called him a monster. A psychopath. A terrorist. I did too—at first. Because it was easier than saying: my son did this. My son became someone I didn't see coming. Someone I didn’t protect people from.

I combed through everything he ever wrote, desperate for clues. The journals were filled with loneliness, rage, small humiliations that festered. But there were also pieces of poetry. Apologies never given. Notes he never shared that said things like, “I wish someone would sit with me at lunch.” And: “Does anyone ever feel as empty as I do?”

It doesn’t matter now. Nothing changes what he did.

But I wake up every morning thinking about the parents whose children never came home. I whisper their names. I say I’m sorry. I know it will never be enough. I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.

The mailbox stayed empty for months. No cards, no condolences. I received one letter—anonymously. All it said was, "How did you not know?"

I still ask myself that every day.

The hardest part is the remembering. The good things. The boy who slept with a nightlight until he was nine. The one who cried during that movie about the lost dog. The one who hugged his teacher goodbye on the last day of third grade. Those moments are mine alone now—and they feel stolen. I don’t know if I have the right to them anymore.

I tried to go back to work. Lasted two days. People didn’t look at me. Or worse—they did. Like I was contagious.

Therapy helps, some. My therapist says guilt is a cage you build yourself, and grief is the key. But I don’t want a key. I just want to understand how this happened. How he happened.

Sometimes I think about reaching out to the families. Writing them. Telling them about Eli—the parts that weren’t broken. But who am I to speak his name to them? I wouldn’t want to hear it, if I were them.

There was one moment, months later, that lingers in my memory. I was at the grocery store. Just trying to buy milk. A woman was staring at the soup cans, frozen. Her daughter—I recognized her from the news. One of the victims. My heart seized. I wanted to speak, to apologize, to crumble at her feet. But I didn’t. I turned and left the store, leaving my cart behind.

On the anniversary, I lit candles for each of them. I spoke their names aloud in the quiet room. It felt sacrilegious, maybe. Or necessary. I don’t know. It was the only way I could acknowledge their absence. And Eli's. All of them lost.

I thought about selling the house, but something in me couldn’t let it go. Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s because this place holds the last pieces of Eli that no one else wants—pieces I’m not sure I can abandon.

Sometimes I dream of moving somewhere no one knows my name. A cabin in the woods. A little house near the ocean. I imagine planting something—flowers, herbs, trees. Watching something grow for once. But then I remember I don’t get to start over. Not really. Starting over would mean forgetting, and forgetting feels like betrayal.

I once read about a mother who lost her son in war. She wrote him letters for the rest of her life, tucking them into a box she kept under her bed. I’ve started writing letters too. To Eli. To the victims. To no one. I never send them. They just sit in the drawer, ink bleeding into paper, pain sealed in silence.

So I stay in the quiet room. The one where no one knocks. Where my grief has no welcome mat. I sit here, day after day, sorting through the wreckage, alone.

Sometimes I imagine Eli as he was when he was six—before the shadows took root. We’re at the park, and he’s on the swings, calling for me to watch. I smile. I wave. I run to push him higher. He laughs, light and loud, like he used to. Like he never knew pain.

Then the vision fades, and I am here again. In the house that feels too still. In a world that no longer makes sense. Still whispering: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.