Stop Making Sense

It all started with Hurricane Sandy.

Surveying the damage across the street from our house, October, 2012.

Two weeks after it blew through our region and darkened our home for ten long, cold days, I was driving the kids to swim class and we passed a cavalry of electric company trucks. I burst into tears. Our power was back (it had been restored for a glorious three whole days!) but seeing that army of trucks was a stark reminder, as were the massive overturned trees that could be seen, well, everywhere. People were still suffering. Things were far from normal.

Then came Newtown.

I still find myself tearing up, more often and unexpectedly. I still think about Sandy Hook, every single day when I take Ellie to school. Amidst the bedlam and chaos of elementary school children, weighed down by backpacks and winter coats and hats, shrieking and giggling and hugging and wrestling--life and death feels close. 

Ellie and my bedtime ritual used to include me reading her a book, rubbing her back for a few minutes, tucking her in and saying goodnight. Since December 14, I have stayed with her until her breathing slows and deepens, until she starts to snore adorably (as only those under age ten can make snoring adorable). Staying with her until sleep comes for what she calls our "Snuggle Time," it seems like the least I can do.

I still cannot wrap my brain around what happened at Sandy Hook. It is the epitome of unthinkable. How can any of us begin to grasp it? It simply does not compute, still does not seem possible. Yes, we hug our children tighter and we sign petitions and we give money. What else can we do?

Finally, less than a month ago, half a dozen of my co-workers lost their jobs (and hundreds more, within the company). Friends and esteemed colleagues. Here one day, gone the next.  Empty boxes sat outside offices, poised to be packed. Name plates abruptly came down and now hang blank. This was another kind of "does not compute" but still a very real one, to look around at our morning meeting and feel the void of so many faces. Then: Last week came the rumor that our company may be sold. Who knows what will happen if that transpires.

A hurricane. An elementary school massacre. Hundreds of people out of work. Hardships and horrors of different degrees of course, but tied together by one thread: You never know what's going to happen. You may think you have control, to some degree. But you really don't.

And so, I throw up my hands. Again. 

I learned to throw up my hands for the first time, thirteen years ago when my mother died. And again, when Leo was born, when I was reminded once more of our powerlessness in all of this, in this gift of life we have. You try to prepare and you just can't, no matter how much you think you can. The best you can do is hang on and hope for the best, hope that things are going to work out the way they are supposed to. That's what I'm doing. What choice do I have?

But for the record? I don't like this out of control feeling. Does anyone? I may try to keep things "tidy," with my organizer boxes for everything from toys to linens to Tupperware tops, but in my heart I know that I can't really control much at all.

I just can't recall a time where I have felt that so many things were so very much out of my hands.

Wrecked

I am sorry I was cranky, Bye [sic] Ellie. Ellie wrote me this note a few weeks ago after an evening tantrum.

It always happens like this. A terrible event, a horrific loss puts it all in perspective, reminds us of what really matters. Being late for school suddenly feels trivial. The giant piles of laundry that require me to wade through the floor of the laundry room? Eh.

And then gradually the loss fades away, and my occupation in trivialities returns.

But this time really feels different. And nearly everyone I know agrees.

In the last week I've cried washing dishes. I've cried on the bus to and from work. I've cried listening to "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." I've cried reading about how one of the children who died at Sandy Hook had special needs and his aide reportedly died trying to protect him. I've cried reading about the teacher who barricaded herself and her class in a bathroom, telling her students she loved them because she thought it was the last thing they were going to hear. I've cried dropping Ellie off at school, not because I'm afraid for her safety, but because of all those little faces, all those teachers and support staff and the principal. It could have been any of them.

"I can't even think about it," a dear friend wrote in an email yesterday. "Except I can't stop thinking about it."

It just feels so close.

"What Six Looks Like" summed it up perfectly for me (if you haven't read it already, please do). Why are so many parents of young children having such a difficult time with what happened in Newtown (aside, of course from the obvious horror of it?)--By the way, I'm not saying that it's only the parents of young children who are struggling--I'm just speaking about it from that perspective:

"I think it's because we know what six looks like. We see it every day... in all its glory...this friend and I both have a six-year-old child. I, a six-year-old son. She, a six-year-old daughter. Both are in first grade. Both, I imagine, so heart-breakingly similar to those 20 kids who were so brutally and senselessly killed on Friday morning. And we do, indeed, know what six looks like. We do see it every day. In all its glory. We see the good, the bad and the ugly. The beautiful and the infuriating. It's in our face. We live it and breathe it."

Overnight, mundane events like school drop off and bedtime became fraught and loaded.

For some reason Ellie has been having a hard time going to sleep the last few weeks, and coincidentally it heightened following the Newtown shooting (and no, she doesn't know about it).

She wants to sleep in our bed. She wants us to stay with her until she goes to sleep. She's lonely. She's scared and sad. But she can't tell me what she's afraid of or why she's sad.

In my head I'm thinking: Will you just go to sleep? I still need to pack lunches and snacks and clean up the kitchen and hopefully do a load of laundry-lights-we need more washcloths-before I collapse into bed with Words With Friends. Really I just want to play Words With Friends.

But in my heart? I'm thinking about how she is hurting and scared. And would it be so terrible for me to wait another thirty minutes to make the damn lunches? I could lie down next to her and listen to her breathing change as she slowly relaxes and falls asleep, feel the warmth of her small, sturdy body next to mine (but not too close--she gets hot--sleeps with a fan in December--don't ask).

I think of the parents less than two hours away who I imagine would love to have a drawn out bedtime with their children.


This is Five: Ellie's illustration of last week's unit on Probability. I realize I'm biased, but I don't think it really gets much cuter than this.

"The harder life is, the softer I must become," read a comment on a blog I read sporadically. Yes. This. It's hard to care so much about packing lunches and loading the dishwasher, right now. Except that those tasks do still have to get done, preferably before 10:30 p.m.

But right now, I have more patience. I am yelling less. I am hugging more. I am stepping over toys instead of fretting about the mess and clutter.

I would like to stop crying, and I know that I will. But I don't want to forget this feeling, or all that we lost that day.

Love and Light: It's All I Have

Yesterday morning, bleak, cold and rainy, I dropped Ellie off at school, like any other Monday. Except it wasn't any other Monday. It was three days after Newtown. It was the day the funerals started. 

I thought about all those parents, who had hugged and kissed their little first graders goodbye on Friday morning. Not knowing, of course, that the unthinkable was about to happen.


As a parent, I worry about a lot of things. But never, in a million years, would this scenario have entered my mind. 


First graders.


Teachers and administrators and educators just doing their jobs.


None of it makes any sense. There is no way to explain what happened, there is no "reason" for it. Yes, we can hope and pray that some good comes out of this terrible tragedy, but that won't make the losses any less heartbreaking.


I can't stop thinking about the parents. The siblings. Lives will never, ever be the same. 


It's human nature to seek comfort and answers, when something so awful happens. I do like what President Obama said at the memorial service in Newtown on Sunday:


We know our time on this Earth is fleeting. We know that we will each have our share of pleasure and pain, that even after we chase after some earthly goal, whether it’s wealth or power or fame or just simple comfort, we will, in some fashion, fall short of what we had hoped. We know that, no matter how good our intentions, we’ll all stumble sometimes in some way.


We’ll make mistakes, we’ll experience hardships and even when we’re trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern God’s heavenly plans.


There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true.The memories we have of them, the joy that they bring, the wonder we see through their eyes, that fierce and boundless love we feel for them, a love that takes us out of ourselves and binds us to something larger, we know that’s what matters.

Others have been saying better, what I've been feeling. I wish I could do something with this grief, this guilt (besides donate money, yes, donating to very worthy causes is of course, wonderful). I'm interested in this idea of Tonglen, a Tibetan Buddhist term, which writer Kyran Pittman describes as something that "teaches neither to resist or cling to suffering when it comes, but breathe in the pain, and breathe out peace. A kind of spiritual photosynthesis that helps everyone."

Perhaps of little comfort to those who have lost a child (I don't dare imagine or speculate as to what they are feeling). But, something. I have to do something.  

***

In the midst of the horror, tiny gems of grace are trickling in. I was moved this morning by the story of Gene Rosen, a retiree who found a group of Sandy Hook students at the end of his driveway minutes after they escaped the school shooting. "We can't go back to school," one little boy reportedly told Rosen. "Our teacher is dead. Mrs. Soto; we don't have a teacher." 

Rosen entertained them with stuffed animals, gave them juice and called their parents. He said it was his experience as a grandparent, not a trained psychologist, that helped him on Friday.


Look for the helpers, as the wise Mr. Rogers advised, in a now well known quote that (deservedly) went viral shortly after the shootings in Newtown:


When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”


***


A twin group I'm a member of raised $5,000 in less than twenty-four hours, to plant a tree in Central Park for Noah Pozen, one of the young shooting victims who was also a twin. They actually raised close to $7,000, total (and people are continuing to give). A donor just stepped in to donate an additional $5,000 for a second tree, a "twin" that will grow beside Noah's tree.


***

Saturday night was the last night of Hanukkah. I was tired and emotional and I'm a little embarrassed to admit there was a part of me that hoped the kids would forget. I didn't feel like dealing with the frustration of trying to jam fragile candles into tiny, wax clogged holes (there has to be a better solution, menorah makers of the world!) while Leo and Ellie bickered about who go to light which candle first;  and then I'd be left with cleaning the mess of the melted wax off of the kitchen table. But wouldn't you know it? Ellie has fallen head over heels for the whole notion of "a present every night" and she would certainly not let me forget it (lighting candles = presents).

And how could I ignore the eighth night, when all the candles are lit?

For the first time this year, I used all three menorahs.

They flooded our little house with light. 

It was all I could do.