Victim's Parents Celebrate a Life

Tom and Daniel used to play a game where they'd try to scare each other. Whoever caught the other more off guard got points. Daniel usually won by catching his dad at the bottom of the basement stairs. Every now and then, Tom feels like Daniel is going to pop out at the bottom of those stairs.

"Logic and reason tell me he's gone," Tom says. "But I know that in a week, or a month or a year from now, I'll still be thinking that this was a bad dream and he'll come back."

The stairway leading up to the second floor of the Mausers' Littleton home is covered with baby pictures and school portraits of Daniel and Christie. Upstairs in Daniel's room, a poster still hangs above Daniel's bed. On it, a chubby cat is frowning, standing above the words, "I AM smiling."

But the room now is filled with piles of newspapers and grocery bags stuffed with sympathy cards.

There is an empty place at the dinner table.

The Mausers are a family that eats dinner together, says grace together, goes to the movies together. They know their children's friends, their teachers.

"They are the kind of parents who know what their kids are reading, what their thoughts are on social issues, like Daniel saying there are a lot of loopholes in the Brady law," says Marlene Dallas, who introduced the Mausers to each other.

Linda went to Utah for Memorial Day weekend with Christie and Marlene just to take a break. It was an annual "girls-only" trip that they had scheduled before the tragedy.

"Under the circumstances, they all seem to be doing really well," Marlene says. "I'm no grief counselor, but I can see the different stages - alternating between the anger and the sadness and sometimes back into the shock like we all do."

The Mausers have relied on their Catholic faith. They have talked about forgiveness, but it's still a little early for that.

"No one can judge another, and I don't know what the circumstances in those boys' lives were and what they were influenced by," Linda says of the gunmen. "I can't judge that. But I can't be so glib as just to say, 'I totally forgive everything.'"

"I'm just in a place where I'm working on it."

But there are angry, lingering questions about parental responsibility.

"It's difficult for me to comprehend that one day your kid is just an average kid and the next day they're a homicidal maniac," Linda says. "It's hard for me to figure that there weren't some signposts on the way."

More than anything, Tom and Linda are focusing on celebrating Daniel's life. They feel there has been too much talk of the gunmen and not enough about the victims. They don't want Daniel to become a statistic.

"I think we gave him 15 really good years, and he gave us 15 wonderful years," Tom says. "That's what we have to reflect on."

Like some of the other families of Columbine victims, the Mausers have created a Web site - www.danielmauser.com - in their son's memory. A computerized photo album shows Daniel as a newborn in his mother's and father's arms in the delivery room, Daniel and Christie giving toothy grins as toddlers with their blond hair shining in the sun and Daniel playing video games with Jeremy.

Other sections include memories of Daniel's life, pictures of the other Columbine victims and information about fighting gun violence.

"It's one thing to lose a child in an auto accident, but this is such a public thing, and the courage Tom and Linda have shown has been so admirable," says Erik Koskinen, one of Tom's co-workers who helped design the Web site. "I really wondered if I would have shown the same courage and strength in the face of something like that."

It helps that when Tom and Linda look back on Daniel's life, they know they did the best job they could as parents.

"One comfort we have is this: I think the kid had a pretty wonderful life," Linda says.

And when the sadness seems overwhelming, the Mausers remember Daniel's innocent smile, his playfulness.

They think about the deer in the sunlight watching them from afar. And they feel peace.