Her stepdad sold the house in Parker and left Colorado. Rebecca and her sister drifted. The ties that had held them so close began to unravel. "People grieve differently," she says. "What works for some people won't work for others. When people grieve so differently in your own family, it adds to the stress. Sometimes families come together. Mine did not."
At one point Rebecca even considered buying a gun. As much as she hated the thought, she didn't feel safe. "I saw every single stranger as a potential killer," she says. "This whole thing shattered my idea of where safe places were and where they weren't. It shattered my whole idea of being able to protect myself from violence."
Finally, she pulled through. She decided that her mom would not want her to live in fear, anger and bitterness. "She didn't want Nathan Dunlap to kill me, too, by turning me into something I wasn't," she says. "My feeling better was not going to come from something external. It had to come from me."
She decided to resume her career. In 1995 she found a way to combine her training in psychology and criminal justice: She became an advocate for the victims of juvenile crime with a local law-enforcement agency. She listens when these victims need to talk, she refers them to counselors, she guides them through the legal system, she sits beside them in court; she also speaks to schoolkids, prison inmates, legislators and anyone else willing to learn how violence affects the survivors. "I just want to be there for them in any way I can," she says.
But Rebecca is careful to separate her personal experience from her professional life--so much so that she does not want her photo to appear in Westword or her workplace mentioned. "I don't claim to be an expert on tragedy and grief," she says. "Everyone's experience is different. Talking about my pain would only take the focus away from victims, and that's not what I want to do. I'm not in this for my own therapy. I'm not on a crusade to save the world. I'm doing this because I like people and I want to help them. If I can make their experience a little less painful, then I've done my job."
After five years, the good memories have begun to shine through the darkness. Rebecca no longer sees her mom for how she died, but for how she lived. She no longer imagines her on the restaurant floor, but in the kitchen with a plate of chocolate chip cookies, telling Rebecca to drive carefully on her way back to California. "Relationships are the most important thing in the world," she says. "When you find people you care about, hang on as tightly as you can, because you never know when something like this will happen."
Although she has not seen her stepdad in three years, they spoke at Christmas. She has also reached out to her sister and her old friends. From time to time, she visits the waterfall near Evergreen where her mom's ashes were scattered and lights a candle at the Mother Cabrini shrine.
The holidays are hard. So is her mom's birthday, Mother's Day and the anniversary of her mom's death. There are times when she'd give anything to feel her mom's embrace, to hear her voice one last time. When those moments come, Rebecca looks hard in the mirror. There she finds the woman Margaret Kohlberg taught her to be.
"I'm living proof that she was here," Rebecca says. "She meant something. She was important. She was a mother, a wife and a friend. This is something I will go through the rest of my life, but I'm happy again. I'm getting on with my life in a way to make my mom proud. Through some small part of me, people will know who she was.
