Mom honors daughter who didn’t miss a beat
Seven-year-old Josephine Grace Gay left behind a “legacy of joy” when she died on Dec. 14, 2012, said her mother, Michele.
Josephine, or “Joey,” was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School three days after her birthday and a month before her family was set to move to Massachusetts. Nineteen other children and six educators lost their lives in the school shooting 10 years ago this month.
After the tragedy, Gay and a fellow mother whose daughter also died that day, created a nonprofit dedicated to improving school safety.
“Approaching this 10-year mark is heavy,” Gay told Heart Connecticut Media. “Every year, we are faced with this day of remembrance, and there’s a lot of tension and a lot of, kind of, pressure that comes with it. But I think ... we just have to be sort of disciplined in stepping back and recognizing that it is important, it sort of unifies folks around the activity of remembering.”
Michele Gay said that she, her husband, Bob, and their daughters, Sophie and Marie, remember Joey every day of the year. They went forward with their move to Massachusetts after the shooting but later left New England.
“We have ... made some progress over the 10 years in being able to process and understand and kind of come to terms with all the different milestones in the process,” Michele Gay said. “And that year mark every year is part of the process.”
Joey, the youngest of Michele and Bob Gay’s three daughters, was born in Maryland. She couldn’t get enough of the color purple. A playground with purple features was built in her honor in Bridgeport in 2013.
Joey was on the autism spectrum and nonverbal. After her death, her family created Joey’s Fund with the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism to support families who have children with autism. More than $375,000 has gone to about 200 families since the fund was established, according to the foundation’s website.
Michele Gay said her family remembers Joey for how she connected with and was loved by many people.
“She was also very mischievous,” her mother said. “I think sometimes people didn’t realize how very strategic and sometimes cunning she was to get her way. But those are things that those ... who were so close to her — her friends, her classmates, her neighbors and all the neighborhood kids — like, they all knew that she wasn’t missing a beat, so don’t be fooled.”
Honoring Joey
The family has made it through the past 10 years with the help of therapy and by accepting that recovery is a “lifelong journey,” which shouldn’t be done alone, Gay said.
“We’re standing, and that is something to recognize and honor,” she said.
Joey’s older sisters are now in college. Both have “moved forward in ways that really honor their sister and stay true to her memory,” Michele Gay said. She said her surviving daughters have kept her motivated.
Gay recalled the day of the tragedy and how she watched it unfold not only as a parent but also as a former elementary school teacher. In the time after, she and Alissa Parker, the mother of Emilie Parker, one of Joey’s friends who was also killed, kept returning to the topic of school safety in their conversations.
“We were both going to need to return our kids to school, and we just could not wrap our heads around it,” Gay said. “And that led us to really start focusing on how we could help, how we could make it OK for ourselves to send our girls back to school, but also ... we knew that we weren’t the only people that were struggling with this idea of feeling safe about sending their kids or their spouses or their adult daughters and sons to go work in school.”
“It just became very obvious that the legacy we were going to build for our girls is ensuring that schools are safe,” she said.
In 2013, Gay and Parker started Safe and Sound Schools, which initially focused on physical safety and security and later expanded to mental and behavioral health. The nonprofit works with experts across the nation, provides educational resources, and holds regional and national summits. It doesn’t take a stance on gun control.
Last year, Gay said Safe and Sound Schools launched a program in Joey’s honor called “Especially Safe,” which provides guides for ensuring that students and staff with special needs are considered as part of safety planning and emergency drills.
In general when it comes to preparing for possible emergencies, Gay said it is crucial to think about “what is age and ability appropriate” for individual students and teachers.
“Otherwise, we risk traumatizing or scaring people,” she said. “And that takes away from the point of being able to go to school and grow and learn and become the young people that will change the world.”
Gay said it has been “healing work.”
Another key source of comfort for her and her family has been their Catholic faith. They were parishioners at St. Rose of Lima in Newtown, and Gay said they have remained connected to the church.
“Whenever I do present around the country, I’m always very honest and open about that,” Gay said. “I’m not preaching. I’m not trying to convert anybody. But as we talk about resiliency and as we talk about recovery, it’s really important to examine the things that were there before you had a crisis or a tragedy. Those ... are the things that end up serving you in the midst of those difficult times and then throughout the long journey forward.”