At this point, I think pretty much everyone around the world who has a TV or connection to the Internet has heard about the horrific events that unfolded Friday morning in Newtown, CT. There has been an outpouring of support the likes of which I haven't seen since the terrorists came on 9/11 and caused so much death and destruction. While no death is ever justified when at the hands of another, this massacre on Friday morning went beyond horrific to the realm of the unimaginable. What made this tragedy so heart wrenching was the death of 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 years old, the age of innocence, the age where nothing matters except playing with friends, going to school, and being with family. For a child that age, there is no real concept of "murder" or "assassination". For the most part, children this age are shielded from the horrors of the world by caring parents and in large part, from their inability to grasp a larger reality that is too often filled with death and destruction. We as parents would never show children this age a movie or a show where someone was killed in cold blood. We know that their little brains don't have the capability of processing such images of carnage, barbarism, and destruction of human life. Yet, despite our best efforts to shield our children from such death and destruction, 20 young children were thrust into the middle of such barbaric acts and did not survive. What makes it even worse is that hundreds of other children now have to deal with this frightening reality that we as adults call the real world. Yet, even as I write that we as adults call this the "real world", there is nothing "real" about what happened on Friday. In some ways, to our own detriment, we have grown accustomed to the news of mass killings, psychotic killers roaming around searching for an avenue to enact their sick twisted plots. However, none of the other 15 mass killing just this year could have prepared us for the 16th one, perhaps the worst one ever considering the age of those killed. In many ways, the events that transpired on Friday morning left all of us with many more questions than answers and I fear that for most of us, many of those questions can never be answered. We will never know what prompted a 20 year old young man to go on this killing spree. There will be many who make assumptions as to the motive, even more who claim to have the correct answer and response, yet I don't think any of us will ever feel that those answers are enough. As a result of not having answers, I think we will have a much harder time healing from this tragedy than from any other. In the days and weeks to come, we will see movements made to address the situation, we will hear from politicians and the media, yet nothing they say can ever reverse the events of Friday; events that should never have happened, yet for whatever reason did. There are no words I can even say to make this easier on anyone involved and I would never try to offer those words as they would be largely inadequate.
Living in Connecticut and only 20 minutes away from where this tragedy took place, it hits way too close to home. While I didn't personally know anyone involved in the tragedy, I know people who had connections to the tragedy and I also know people who will be helping in the healing process. I for one am having a difficult time with this tragedy. Anything I feel is light years away from what the victims families must be going through. The empathy I have for them as a parent myself is crushing. I was talking to a friend yesterday and mentioned that when a mass killing happens in another state or across the country, the distance seems to lessen the gravity of the situation. When it happens so close to home, it makes you stop and think long and hard about how something like this could have happened. Yet, this morning as I write this post, I feel that if this tragedy happened anywhere else, I would still be affected by it. I have a fourteen month old son, not school age yet, but I can not fathom having to go through an incident like the one on Friday. The fact that the tragedy took the lives of such young children makes the news of it hit that much harder and that much closer to your heart. As a writer and observer of people, I try on a regular basis to put myself in other people's shoes and feel what they are feeling, see what they are seeing, and to put it even simpler, to empathize with them. After this tragedy, anytime I try to empathize with the families of the victims, I cry. There is nothing I can do to stop the tears from coming when I put myself in the shoes of those parents. If I, who was not directly connected to the tragedy that took place, am reacting the way I am, I can honestly say I would not want to be one of those parents. Yet, in a way, it makes me realize that no matter what I do to protect my own son, there could be a day when something happens to him that I can't control. That to me, is the hardest thing to come to terms with as a parent, the unknown evils that could visit themselves upon our family and turn life around on a dime. This latest tragedy shows us quite literally that we never know what life has in store for us, either good or bad. Perhaps now more than ever we need to live in the present, enjoy every day as best we can, and not think to long and hard about the past or the future. Nothing is within our control except how we react to life, how we interact with loved ones, and how we decide to live our lives.
For those affected, living life to the fullest will be hard to do I imagine. Yet, I feel that with the support of the community, loved ones, and friends, most if not all will make it through. Will they be changed? Absolutely. I don't think that anyone could ever endure such tragedy and not be altered fundamentally in some way. For me, I am still processing what happened. While I know what happened and have seen the faces of the children who were assassinated, there is still a part of me that is coming to grips with what happened. On some level, I don't think we can ever fully process such a tragedy as this. There are no words to say to make it better or to alleviate the pain. There are no actions that can be taken now to make a difference outside of offering a hug or a consoling touch. At this point, we can only grieve for the loss of those children and the adults who did their best to protect them. Right now, Connecticut is engulfed in sorrow and disbelief. Simply going through every day life, you see the sorrow and pain on the faces of many people, even of those who were not directly involved. People eyes are red from grieving in their own way, and the pain is palpable, so thick in some places you could slice through it with a butter knife. Yet there is also a deeper sense of community, one that I hope remains. Relationships seem to be moving deeper amongst people and there seems to be more understanding. For now, we can only pray for those directly affected. Its comforting in a way to hear news outlets even saying that the only thing we can do is keep those in our thoughts and prayers. I know things will go "back to normal" eventually, but for now, to hear even the President reciting Biblical verses at a vigil shows that people have not forgotten who God is. For now, I need to stop writing, but I assure you I will have much more to say over the coming week as I think and process more. Before I completely finish, I want to leave you with a little story that broke my heart. I heard this yesterday at church from Fr. Tom who knows the priest in Newtown. A father went to the priest at St. Rose of Lima in Newtown to tell him what happened Friday morning. This man gets up very early for work as he has to leave his house by 5 A.M. He never got to see his daughter in the morning as a result. Friday, however, as he was getting ready for work around 4:30, his daughter got up, came downstairs, and said, "I just wanted to tell you I love you Daddy." With that she went back upstairs and back to bed. That was the last time he got to see his daughter and the last words he got to hear from her.
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