For McGee’s full letter,

To the editor,

When we moved to New Canaan, I knew three facts: we would be near my brother and his family, we would finally have more than 1,500 square feet of living space, and our children would get a topnotch education. My biggest fears, expressed to many closest to me were: Would I make friends and how would I fill my family’s fridge and bellies with food when we lived 12 minutes from the closest food store and I worked fulltime?

On Dec. 10, my son died at our home after being accidentally struck by a vehicle and suffering severe head trauma upon impact with our driveway. He was 21 days shy of his second birthday. We experienced the unimaginable.

Back in late spring 2017, two days before we moved our family of five from New York City to New Canaan, we found out I was surprisingly pregnant with Lukey. And, less than two and a half years later, Lukey was surprisingly gone. How? What could I have done to prevent this? How did a million microdecisions — and, at times, bigger decisions like moving to a place where we drive cars and have driveways, and don’t have bolt locks and doormen and our amazing nanny — cause such a horrific outcome? How, how, how? My rational, organized mind was searching for an input, an explanation, and action to blame. I simply could not shake what I now see is basically Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

It wasn’t until a few days after Lukey died that someone helped me see there was one word in that equation that simply was not true about our circumstance: EQUAL. There are no actions, no inputs that come even remotely close to equaling that horrific reaction, that terrible outcome which was our son dying.

In the days since I have started to emerge from the fog, one thing has become clear: This town, the hearts of fellow parents and our unbelievable tribe of family, friends, acquaintances and neighbors are carrying our family through. This community, of which we are so blessed to be a part, and our cast of loved ones who embrace us from near and far, have proven Newton wrong yet again. They have showered us with not even remotely an equal reaction to the loss of our boy, but instead an unbelievably huge, immeasurable, outsized reaction of incomprehensible magnitude. For this, we are forever grateful.

Kate McGee’s son died after being struck by a vehicle in a driveway in New Canaan last week.