Only one of their kids survived Sandy Hook

Now school posed a new threat: COVID-19

The teen was sitting on his living room couch watching another episode of “The Office” when the email popped up on his cellphone. Isaiah MarquezGreene skimmed past the opening two paragraphs until, at the third, he paused: “This decision to open campus ...

He was thrilled. Four months into the pandemic, Isaiah, 16, longed to play hockey, to see his friends, to return for his sophomore year to the Connecticut boarding school he had worked so hard to get into. Maybe this news meant all those things would happen, he thought for a moment, before the reality of who he is came back to him.

Millions of parents had begun to worry by that July afternoon about schools reopening in the fall, but many found comfort in what they knew of the novel coronavirus. Most children who got sick would be fine. Seldom would they be hospitalized. Rarely - in only the worst cases - would they die. But Isaiah understood how little solace that knowledge offered his parents. They knew the worst could happen.

On a cold winter morning in 2012, Isaiah had cowered in a third-grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, listening to the gunshots that were ending the lives of six staff members and 20 firstgraders, including his sister, Ana Grace. He was 8. She was 6.

“I don’t want to be an only child,” he told his mom and dad that December night after they explained to him Ana was gone. But that’s what he had become: their only surviving child.

Now, eight years after the massacre that shattered his family and devastated the country, another threat - the deadliest pandemic in a century - had arrived on America’s campuses. On the living room couch, just down the hall from a collection of his sister’s framed portraits, Isaiah had trouble believing his parents could bear to send him back.

He closed the email and checked Snapchat. “I’m going,” all of his elated classmates were declaring in a group thread, so he messaged his roommate, who told him the same thing.

Am I going to be the only one who doesn’t go? Isaiah wondered at the same time his mom, Nelba MarquezGreene, was reading the email in her office upstairs.

She was shocked. Nelba had assumed the campus would remain closed and had spent weeks considering how to help her son through virtual classes in the fall. It was so unfair, she thought at the time, but at least he would be safe with them, at home. Now she didn’t know what to think.

Nelba, a marriage and family therapist, had struggled at first with the idea of letting her son leave for boarding school a year earlier, but she and her husband, Jimmy Greene, respected Isaiah and worked hard never to let their trauma or fear dictate the way they raised him. He wanted to go there and earned it, receiving a sixfigure scholarship that covered the tuition their middle-class family never could have afforded.

Then came the virus, shutdowns, soaring death tolls and suddenly, amid all of it, a torturous dilemma. She thought about the other parents whose children had also lived through school shootings. There were tens of thousands of those kids, and though most didn’t lose a sibling, they had all learned that danger could reach them anywhere, even in a classroom.

Downstairs, Isaiah heard his mom call him.

“Did you read the email?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. Had he talked to his friends?

“They’re all going,” he told her, so Nelba forced herself to say it would be his choice. She trusted him, she said, to be smart and weigh the danger of going back, but Isaiah could see the fear in her eyes.

There’s no way she’ll let me go.

That afternoon, Nelba took a long drive, stopping at the cemetery where her daughter was buried. She stood in front of the heartshaped gravestone.

At the cemetery, Nelba looked down. They always thought of their family as a band, so in front of the gravestone were four tin frogs, each playing an instrument. Ana’s was the smallest. She would have been 14.

“It was enough to lose you,” Nelba told her daughter, as she thought of her son. “I can’t believe I have to do this now.”