Put this sticker on your car, but not that one. Describe forgiveness, but don’t prescribe forgiveness. Go back to school right away, but don’t go back too soon. So, attend every funeral for every child, but attend to your own child who was with her fourth grade class that day. There’s no training for navigating the aftermath of a shooting. There’s training for a wild animal in the school, for high wind, for an active shooter. These subsequent months and years are the more difficult phase, the fraught Part Two. Gradually, the mind kicks back in and then decisions and realities came one after another. Perry, I understood the dry mouth, the cookies in the pencil drawer, the inability to recognize a Starbucks uniform. After learning of research and writing by Steven Marans, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, Bessel van der Kolk, Carolyn Lunsford Mears, and Bruce D. Only years later would I fully come to understand how the traumatized brain and body work. Slowly, the mind and body came back together. What else did we need to feel whole? Did we need the union’s grocery gift certificate? The two extra personal days? The tokens and trinkets from all over the world left nearly daily in our school mailboxes? In time, many realized we needed therapy, career changes, massage, prayer, transfers within the district, EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), medication, and connection with staff from Columbine-but in the meantime, we watched Powerpoints about the importance of sleep, dabbed ourselves with essential oils when offered, shared gallows humor over well-meaning cut-and-paste school district wellness emails, and sat in school assemblies as authors and actors offered their time and talent intending to help us and our students heal. I remember feeling the hope that I could feel whole again. I wasn’t just a channel for sorrow and guilt, I could move in a calm and beautiful way.
I remember the startle of realizing that-yes-my body could do this too. I went to a yoga class at a studio in Sandy Hook and saw myself holding a pose in the mirror. My mind could not take it in, so my eyes needed to see it, to size it up, to make visual and tangible the horrible enormity. The destruction and loss was unfathomable. In church, at a store, even at the funerals. I developed a habit of counting off 26 people wherever I went. Even now, when I look through the hundreds of emails I sent myself, I read some as if for the first time. I made a new Gmail account and emailed myself thoughts because my mind couldn’t hold them. When there was complaining at a PTA meeting, one mom called out, “If you have your kids, shut up!” And yet, even as I did, I felt others who had been injured or lost family members could judge me-involved only tangentially, to have been physically unaffected, to have had a happy ending. I saw people three or four times removed from the event being interviewed, and I judged them for their quick willingness to characterize our situation.
I walked through the Sandy Hook town center as so many did, visiting the homemade memorials, watching the media trucks. I felt a bodily need to rid myself of my story, to hear it told aloud, to bear witness, but I held back.
SANDY HOOK VICTIMS SKIN
As if to walk past me you’d read on my skin WAS IN BUILDING WAS IN BUILDING WAS IN BUILDING.
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