Marsha A. Willis is Program Director for the Americas Development Group which advises U.S. and Mexican public and private sector entities in matters pertaining to business and trade. She is also vice president of the Ethan Foundation, which was formed to raise public awareness of traffic safety.

She and her husband Mark live in Denver with their adopted daughter Rima.

Interview with Marsha A. Willis, Author
The Ethan Chronicles: Requiem for a Life Stolen

This is such a personal story. Can you tell us why you decided to write this book and bring your family’s intimate tale to the public?

Well, first of all, yes, it is an intimate story, but because the story was covered by national television, it already was public. Besides, I believe it is "intimate" because the experience of a child’s death is so stripped of pretense; it’s raw and down to the essence of a person living out her greatest fear. I think those are the stories we really need to be sharing with each other.

Ethan had been writing a novel when he was killed. I was looking for some way to extend his legacy and I thought trying to continue his writing might be one way. And as all the little details of the circumstances leading up to his death kept coming out, they struck me as utterly unbelievable! I felt that I should write them up. And, as it turned out, it was very therapeutic for me.

This all happened a year before Columbine, and when I started writing the book, nobody was really talking yet about our disaffected youth, and how they were capable of killing kids who were doing well--or the role of the parents and other community players in all of this. I felt people ought to know what had happened to Ethan and to us and how tragic it all was at so many levels.

Why did you write this book the way you did--that is, why creative non-fiction, told in the third-person? Why not just tell it as a first person true story?

One of the things that happens when your child dies is that many people don’t know what to say to you, so they try to avoid you and not talk about what happened. I felt that if I wrote the book from my own perspective it would be just too painful for most people to read. And I thought that if I told it as a narrative, there was enough material that was pertinent and interesting, that people who might not otherwise read a story involving the death of a child might be willing and able to pick it up.

And by telling it in the third person, I think I was able to get a more universal perspective on my own pain. It gave me a little distance, and sometimes I was able to actually see my story as just one more human tale.

I noticed you changed some of the place names, and people names in this book, but you left others as they are in real life. What was the point of that?

Well, I wanted to set the story in Colorado where it actually took place, so cities like Denver and Colorado Springs would have to be givens. And I wanted it to be about Ethan, so I used his real name as well.

But I wasn’t trying to write it the way a journalist would. Although everything in the story line was something that was told to me about the case, and not something I invented myself, I was more into just capturing it on paper than investigating it. So because I couldn’t absolutely substantiate all my facts, it seemed better and safer and healthier for everyone to acknowledge it as "fictionalized."

Furthermore, I think at this point its value is more as a story about "Everyman" or "Every Family" than as an exposé. That’s already been done. The people involved have moved on, and many are, hopefully, trying to live a more conscious life. I don’t see a need to keep stirring them up.

I see you are donating all the net proceeds from the sale of this book to The Ethan Foundation. What is the Ethan Foundation?

Ethan’s family—his father, his stepfather, me, and his wife, who has since remarried—wanted, as I mentioned before, to memorialize him because he was just such a positive, fun person, and we loved him so much. We decided to create The Ethan Foundation to help raise awareness of traffic safety issues, good parenting principles and miscellaneous educational objectives. The Ethan Foundation is actually publishing The Ethan Chronicles, because getting this story out fits perfectly within its mission. And we’re looking into other programs of traffic safety awareness, especially for high schools.

Would you call this a "message book"? What are you hoping will come out of it?

This book tells a true story. It’s a contemporary tragedy, with good people and careless people, a flawed system and the convergence of many elements into the death of an innocent and promising young man. I think whenever you have such a story, there are messages that a reader can’t help but come away with. It’s the classic human drama played out again over and over in different settings.

I think it is a story that needed to be told, and now I’m just tossing it out there like a message in a bottle. If some benefit can come of it, so much the better. Of course I’m hoping the book will be one more small pointer for all of us to appreciate Life more and to act in ways that will keep other people from having to learn these excruciating lessons firsthand.

There are a number of themes in this book besides the most obvious moral, which is increased traffic safety awareness. Can you talk a little about those?

There are a number of questions that arise from this story, and as a mother looking to understand what happened, the protagonist in the book tries to find answers. Many of the themes are the same ones that came out of Columbine and other school shootings: What’s happening with kids today? Can their troubled minds be detected before they end up killing someone? What can parents do? What can outside observers do? What should educators and law enforcement and the judicial system be doing?

And, of course, I was dealing with questions about how much our kids mean to us, about life and death, and how people tend to treat someone who’s experiencing deep grief and anger. As I mother I was trying to make sense out of the saddest thing in life having happened to me--the premature death of a child, of my child--my only child.

Several times you have compared the traffic crash that killed Ethan with Columbine. Could you explain how you think the two situations are similar?

Well, there are many kids who may not have the wherewithal to go on the internet and find out how to make bombs to play out their destructive fantasies and express their anger. They may not have access to guns. Or they may not be deliberate enough to locate weapons and plan an attack. Still, I think we’ve increasingly seen in the last few years that people can be seething cauldrons of chaotic energy, and if left to act out their emotions unguided they can do terrible damage to innocent lives.

You know, I think it is a very important thing that people began a national polemic after Columbine. But there is a fact that seems still to be hidden from the public awareness, and it’s this: Every single week, approximately125 high-school-aged kids – Columbine-aged kids – get picked off in onesies and twosies on our nation’s highways. 125!! And those statistics don’t include any other age group. And that number doesn’t include all the people who are injured but not killed!

I think we may, as a society, as parents, have a bit of a blind spot on these issues. I mean, I think most people think fatalities only occur at the hands of drunk drivers, but that’s not true at all. And we seem far more intrigued by school violence--which is admittedly "sexier" than this never-ending carnage on the roads--but the chances kids will be killed at school are infinitesimally smaller than that they’ll be killed going to or from school!

Traffic crashes are by far and away the largest cause of death for people ages 5 to 34 in this country. And the death toll for all ages every year is almost equivalent to all the American fatalities from the Vietnam war. Have you seen that memorial wall in Washington DC? It just goes on and on and on. And yet, we have that every year on our streets and highways in the United States.

Nobody seems really to even notice. It makes you wonder: Where’s the outcry? Where’s the wall commemorating people slaughtered on the road? How different is it for a family to grieve a person killed by an enemy bullet or killed by a car?

Isn’t the situation surrounding Ethan’s death pretty different from most car accidents in that this kid who killed your son had a history of problems?

Maybe the specifics are more aggravated than most because this was a kid who had, as you say, a history of anti-social behaviors, drug and alcohol problems, bad driving. And his parents were particularly slow to impose restraints on his behavior. In fact they continued to buy him another car every time he’d wreck one.

But there are a lot of those kids around—and, for that matter, a lot of dangerous drivers of all ages. Yet we arm them with heavy-duty weapons without so much as blinking an eye! We let 16-year-olds manage something as potentially lethal as a car, with minimum supervision. And we let them out on the highways with everyone else, with our children, and just cross our fingers and hope everything’ll be okay.

You make the point that we should not call these events "accidents" because most of them are preventable. What kinds of things do you think could be done to help prevent them?

First of all, we must always try to model conscious driving behaviors for our kids. From the very beginning, when they’re still strapped in their car-seats, we should avoid manifesting distracted and angry behaviors. We should never play down the gravity and seriousness of the responsibility we have when we’re behind the wheel of these powerful potential weapons we all drive.

That means no cell phones, no radar detectors, no cursing out other drivers, using our turn signals, wearing seat belts, trying to stop on yellow lights…. And we should be talking to our kids about good driving behaviors, pointing out bad driving behaviors, and raising our own--and their--awareness of what’s at stake when we’re out on the road with them.

We should also make sure kids take Driver’s Education, and we should support traffic safety awareness programs in the schools. Once our teenagers have their licenses, they should not be allowed to continue driving if they are manifesting irresponsible behaviors in any area of their lives. Driving should be seen in our society as a privilege, not a right. It’s not fair to the rest of society to send irresponsible people out on the road, and--believe me--the stakes are just way too high!

It seems that after the death of a child, parents often find strength to go on because they have other children who need them. How does a mother find the courage to go on after the death of an only child, or all her children?

I don’t know. It’s a mystery. In fact, Mark Twain said, when he learned of the death of his daughter, "It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live." We are amazing creatures, and courage is somehow one of our attributes – as is shock, which also protects us for a while.

In some ways I believe you never really do recover from the death of a child. I sincerely believe it changes your chemistry and in some way you are actually transformed into another creature--one that can go on. It helps, too, if you can find something to invest your energies into that needs to be done and something you can do to memorialize your child.

We, just last year, adopted a twelve-year-old daughter, and that feels like something important we can do that’ll help keep us invested in the future. And, of course, we can continue to tell this story.

Through experiencing this horrible loss, have you found a deeper faith, or any explanations that help you deal with this tragedy?

I don’t know if I would put it quite like that. I think you are somehow carved out deeper (if it doesn’t finish you off altogether), and you have a greater capacity to feel certain things—but other things will never again matter to you at all. You become a different kind of creature, I think, and there is a certain beauty in that. You are more identified, I suppose, with the eternal. You feel your love for your child all the time and you sort of carry him with you. You sort of have one foot in this plane of existence and one in the other. There’s a bitter-sweetness to everything. It’s very poignant and very human…. In some ways it’s deeply beautiful, really, in that it is a coming home to a very simple place in your heart. I think that’s the only way you survive.

Has the person who killed Ethan ever shown any real remorse yet, and have you been able to forgive him?

He has been through a Victim’s Awareness class in prison, and he did write me a letter of apology in that context, five years after the crash. I think he’s probably starting to realize that this is something that cannot be undone and that he will somehow have to make up for it in his life in another way.

I am making a peace with my life and, of course, Ethan is a very huge part of me--always. I honestly can say I’m not holding on to hatred toward the guy who killed Ethan. But I don’t really feel it’s up to me or within my power to forgive him, either, for killing Ethan. I guess I think that’s between him and Ethan--and the Great Spirit.

What would the ultimate "sound-byte" be that you’d like to leave our listeners with?

We can never value Life enough, but we should try. Love your children. Teach your kids to also value life, and to respect other people’s right to live. Keep your mind and heart open and find good ways to give back to your community. And drive consciously!