Yesterday, as we watched CNN broadcast the cycling stills of parents, some standing frozen with shock, some racing with hair flying, some leaning with their faces against car windows, Jeff and I talked about grief. I told him stories from my childhood and we've been married long enough that he had heard them all. Funny. I don't remember telling them. That is the stuff of grief.
My sister died when I was 11. She was three. Her name was Janice. After she died, we were left behind, my parents and me. Just us in a bungalow that had only recently begun to feel slightly crowded. We were left behind in a house that was vastly empty. We were left to wonder about God and justice. Mercy and forgiveness. Life after death. Love after death. We stopped saying her name because the pain of the word wafting over our lips was too deep, too raw. We shut the door to her bedroom and kept it shut for years. But I would sneak in when I thought no one was looking and I would open the drawers in her bureau to gently finger through the neatly folded anklets, tiny t-shirts, battered dolls. And I would stare out the window of her room at the lilac bushes framing the back of the yard. Had she loved them as much as I do? It was just one more thing I would never know about her.
It's not the same, of course. Janice was killed accidentally. The children in Connecticut were killed by a monster. It's not the same. But ultimately, a child is suddenly gone. "Children are not supposed to die before their parents," my mother started whispering at the funeral. "This kind of thing, it doesn't happen to us," I murmured to myself as I sat in the back seat of my uncle's car when he drove me home from the hospital. I heard those two phrases repeated, repeated, repeated on every broadcast yesterday. They are our mantras and our truths, but we are wrong. Children die before their parents. It does happen to us.
At some point, and for some of the parents it may have happened already, each parent of the children murdered in Connecticut will find themselves forgetting. They may see something so absurd that laughter erupts from them. They might be listening to a piece of beautiful music and their soul soars light with hope. And then they will remember. They will remember their child is dead and they will be filled with searing guilt. How could I? they will ask themselves. What kind of parent am I? In that joyful moment, they will have forgotten about death and they will think this means their child is gone from their life forever. They will experience the loss of their child again with grief washing over them on fresh waves of guilt.
When that happens, I pray the parents will remember the moments, frozen memories like still photographs, when their eyes met their child's and they experienced love so deep and wide they thought their hearts would burst. I pray the parents will remember the small face mirroring that love back with every child's greatest wish: their parent's happiness. I pray the parents will forgive themselves. They could not have known. They did all they could. They will find joy and peace. I pray.
