She makes herself do it.

Judy Shepard doesn't enjoy talking in front of people, living a public life, giving speeches.

``Speech class was my worst nightmare,'' she said.

If only that were still true.

Eleven years ago, on Oct. 12, 1998, Shepard's first-born son, Matt -- ``not Matthew, he was Matt'' -- was beaten to death in Laramie, Wyo.

``This is my survival; this is how I deal with losing Matt,'' she told students this week at South Lakes High School in Reston, Va.

She is the epitome of the grieving, activist parent. They are moms, in their comfortable shoes and wash-and-wear hair, or dads in their chinos and dinners-at-the-Elks-lodge shirts who are suddenly thrust before a microphone and cameras and known across the world.

For parents like me, they are riveting to watch.

Most of the kids listening to Shepard were in preschool when Matt was left to die, tied to a prairie fence after being beaten and robbed because he was gay.

``I looked Matt up online,'' one student told Shepard.

The school has a Gay-Straight Alliance that is vibrant and diverse. Two girls holding hands walked past us in the hallway.

And although hatred and intolerance surely exist, the students I talked to said the mood is pretty cool these days on matters of sexual orientation at South Lakes High.

So maybe these kids are way evolved, and hearing Shepard's story was more like a history lesson. Or maybe it's just high school and totally uncool to show major emotion.

But as for the three moms sitting in the front row, including me, we were a weepy mess. All because we couldn't imagine being in Judy Shepard's (very sensible, low-heeled) shoes.

When she read aloud the victim impact statement that she gave at the sentencing for one of her son's killers 10 years ago, we came undone.

Stoic and practiced, Shepard described how she went into a hospital room to see a person wrapped in bandages and sprouting tubes, unrecognizable as her son except for ``the cute bump on his left ear.'' She could see through the gauze and the vibrant color of one eye, barely open. She recognized the braces on his teeth.

One of the students asked her whether she cared so much about gay rights before her son died. She said she probably would have been a member of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), but little more.

``I would have been the PFLAG mom in the kitchen, baking cookies,'' she said. ``This is not something I ever aspired to do.''

When someone asked about her other son, Logan, Shepard lost it, too. She began to cry when she talked about him, how he had shunned activism and a public life, how he didn't want to live in the shadow of his brother's death.

But she said that some of his gay friends in college sat him down and told him: ``You need to help.'' And he gingerly stepped into the limelight.

She quickly dabbed at her tears. ``Oh. This made me cry,'' she said.

Parental pain is a powerful thing. Think of all the things that are routine today but that were born of a parent's grief: car seats, bike helmets, Megan's Law, Amber Alerts, ``America's Most Wanted,'' the three-strikes law, power-window locks, hot-tub drains.

Some parents deal with much bigger dragons to slay.

When Len Bias, a University of Maryland basketball star, died of a cocaine overdose in 1986, two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics, his mother, Lonise Bias, threw herself into a nationwide campaign against drug use.

``God has given me strength,'' she had said, and the conviction that ``Len died to save other young people from drugs.''

I remember Maureen Kanka, the mother of Megan, who was 7 when she was lured by a neighbor with the promise of seeing a puppy. She was killed by the convicted sex offender in 1994.

Maureen stood behind her screen door in New Jersey, days after her little girl was found dead, unsure whether to talk to me. ``I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to do now,'' she said.

Maureen and her husband, Richard, decided they would step out of their cute little house in Hamilton Township and lead a public life, channeling their grief into what became Megan's Law and a nationwide sex offender registry.

What about the parents of thousands of children killed while riding unrestrained in cars? As kids, we jumped all over the vinyl seats of our parents' station wagons and Pintos as they drove around, unaware we were dancing with death.

Hundreds of parents led a nationwide campaign to make car seats the law. No parent of young children today could imagine driving in a car with kids banging around the seats like pinballs.

That seems like ancient history.

Shepard faces a much more formidable dragon as she takes on the hatred and intolerance that killed her son.

But somewhere in the midst of 11 years of speeches, after all of the hugs she has gotten from other parents and gay kids struggling with their identity, she realized that what she is doing ``is not about Matt anymore; we can't help Matt.''

The cause is larger, she said, and worth every second of discomfort.

(C)2009 The Washington Post

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