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 Marquez-Greene 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 first-graders, 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 six-figure 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.
Isaiah could sense his mother’s anxiety, but he didn’t bring it up. His school - The Post agreed not to name it or identify their town because of repeated threats against Sandy Hook families - wasn’t scheduled to reopen for two more months. Maybe the virus would recede by then, Isaiah thought. He prayed for everything to work out.
Nelba was praying, too, but couldn’t sleep much that night or the next or the one after, finally messaging a friend who is a school nurse.
“I have one child left,” she wrote at 11:24 p.m. “What should we do about school?”
When the day came last year for her and Jimmy to
drop Isaiah off at his new campus, though, what she felt was joy, not agony. As he walked away from them, toward his dorm, they took a photo.
“We put Ana’s body in a coffin in the ground. This is not that day. We already did the hardest day,” she wrote on Facebook. “If we didn’t die at Ana’s burial we won’t die at Isaiah’s rising.”
Isaiah had overheard adults talk about how normal he seemed. He was an A student with a subdued self-confidence and a wry, but never caustic, sense of humor. He seldom panicked, especially on the ice, where he embraced the pressure of protecting his team’s goal. He had a gift for music (drums, piano, saxophone), though he intended to major in sports management in college. As an athlete, he always wanted to win but seldom celebrated with more than fist bumps.
He cherished his memories of Ana - the hugs she insisted on giving him, even when he resisted, and the hymns she belted out as he pecked at the piano - but he refused to exploit her loss, even in personal essays he wrote for his application to a school that accepted just 1 in 10 candidates.
“I didn’t want to be the kid who got into school because of that,” said Isaiah, who at 13 had privately detailed how much her death haunted him.
“If a child doesn’t talk about what happened and seems like they’re ‘fine,’ know that they’re not,” he wrote then. “We are always thinking about what happened.”
A few weeks into his freshman year, he was hanging out in a dorm room
when a friend asked where he lived.
“I’m from Newtown,” he said.
Another teen asked if he had gone to Sandy Hook. “Yeah,” Isaiah replied. “Did you know anyone that died?”
“My sister,” he said, and the room went quiet.
By then, Isaiah had accepted that “12/14,” as survivors call it, would always follow him, even at an affluent private school far from Newtown. During a welcome banquet for parents, a member of the bar staff gasped when he saw Isaiah’s mom.
“Are you OK?” Nelba asked.
He told her he had worked as a caterer at her daughter’s homegoing reception.
“I think of you and your family every day,” he said.
None of them resented those encounters, though. They wanted people to remember Ana. It was why Jimmy dedicated his acclaimed 2014 album, “Beautiful Life,” to his daughter. It was why Nelba created the Ana Grace Project, a foundation to aid traumatized children, and why she became a writer and activist fighting to reform the way America supports grieving families. It was why, four months after the shooting, their son gave President Obama a purple bracelet with his sister’s name on it, just the like one Isaiah has worn nearly every hour of every day since.
His parents still saw him most weeks, usually for hockey games but sometimes because he needed more deodorant or toothpaste. The visits gave him the chance to celebrate their good news, too: his dad’s upcoming new album, set to debut the day before Ana’s birthday in April 2020, and People magazine naming his mother one of the “Women Changing the World in 2019.” Their family was in such a good place that they had even started making plans to leave the cramped home in Newtown where Ana last lived. They at last felt ready.
“I am thankful for surviving Ana’s execution. That will always be a miracle. Now I’d like to thrive,” Nelba posted in late December. “Let’s thrive in 2020.”
Two weeks before Isaiah was scheduled to go back: Nelba learned that if cases in Connecticut continued to increase, she wouldn’t see her son in person again until Thanksgiving.
Six days before: Jimmy reminded her that the chances of their son getting sick were so low, and Nelba thought of those first moments in the firehouse, when, in her mind, there was no chance their daughter could be gone.
Five days before: She read a tweet from the governor’s office, announcing the state’s highest number of reported cases since May.
Four days before: Isaiah caught his mom staring at him. He knew why, but asked her anyway. “Nothing,” she said.
Three days before: Nelba texted his pediatrician. “Am I crazy for allowing him to go?”
Two days before: She and Jimmy signed a form acknowledging that, although the school intended to follow every protocol, they understood that their child could still get infected.
One day before: They got Popeyes for lunch, and Isaiah beat his dad in the summer’s final game of ping-pong. But he put off getting his stuff ready, unaware of how long it would take. Voices were raised. He stayed up past midnight packing his clothes, his Kendrick Lamar poster, his extra purple bracelets. Afterward, as she lay in bed, tears streaked down the side of Nelba’s face.
It was a bright, crisp morning, the clearest Connecticut’s sky had been all week. Isaiah’s parents waited for him in the driveway. Nelba rested her head against Jimmy’s chest as he put his arm around her.
Inside the garage, their son zipped up his navy-blue hockey bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked out into the sunlight, past his sister’s pink Huffy bike, still propped near the wall, and under the metal star - a memorial given to victims’ families - that hung on the yellow siding above the garage door.
Nelba understood that this ride, for him, represented something great. He would get to sit in real classrooms and practice hockey, see his friends and flirt with girls. But, for her, it also offered one last chance to make sure he grasped what was at stake.
“Isaiah, we are really, really taking a big risk letting you go to school,” she said.
“Yes, Mom,” he told her. “I appreciate it.”
“I can’t count on a system. I can’t count on other kids. I can’t count on other parents,” she continued. “I have to count on you, like that, if everything else fails, you will still do the right, smart thing, even if you’re the only one.”
They put on their masks and stopped at a welcome tent where Isaiah was given his keys and name tag and asked to sign an agreement committing to follow the safety plan. Driving behind Jimmy, they continued onto the school’s pristine campus, rounding a shaded drive and parking in front a tall, red-brick building draped in ivy.
“Ana should be here,” Nelba said, and she imagined her daughter saying goodbye to Isaiah, too, or maybe, instead, going with him. She would have been a high school freshman.
Isaiah and Jimmy came back down, and Nelba gave her son one more bottle of Lysol. He unloaded his sticks, and just as he started to pick up his hockey bag, his dad interrupted.
“Give your mom another hug,” Jimmy said.
“Is this the last one?” Nelba asked.
“Last one,” Jimmy said. She took a quick breath and a half-step back, extending her hands out wide. This time, Isaiah put both arms around her.
“I want you to squeeze,” she said.
“I am.”
“Nope. More.” “OK,” he said, smiling. “Bye.”
“Bye,” Nelba said.
She let go.
Isaiah picked up his bag and hugged his dad, then off he went, down a long stone sidewalk toward his dorm. Jimmy pointed his phone to take a photo, and Nelba stood beside him, watching, until their surviving child reached the end of the path, opened the double doors and disappeared.