Sandy Hook’s lesson in grace

On Monday, I will interview former Gov. Dannel Malloy. Ten years ago, it fell to him to tell the families of the 20 children and six grownups murdered in Sandy Hook that they would never see those loved ones again.

On Tuesday, I will interview Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old boy Jesse was killed that day.

I hate this so much. You could take this whole miserable anniversary and push it off the highest cliff and into the darkest air, as far as I’m concerned.

But if you did, it would come wafting back up through the black night and land at your feet. There is no getting rid of a thing like this.

Still, it almost feels too big and too sad to wear the banners and conventions of journalism. “Sandy Hook. Ten Years Later.” We’ve got a hell of a nerve, packaging it up.

But the alternative is … well, there isn’t one. Failure to tell the story, again and again, is its own kind of crime.

Before and after. Those are the lines chalked out over the field of life, until it becomes a grid of pasts foreclosed and futures opening onto unstable terrain. Before this. After this.

“But now when I try to remember how it was, there is only a pit, and it’s so dark, I cannot understand a thing.” The poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote those words.

Before is hard. You try to reach back to before, and you find a word you and your little boy used to say to one another, a word that made you both smile.

And you realize that before is a place where your heart isn’t really welcome anymore. After is where you live now. “It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.” Somebody said that.

Before and after. This is how every last one of us lives.

It’s odd. I found the Milosz line in “The Unspeakable,” a small book by Denise Brown, whose husband Ott was gunned down in the Connecticut Lottery Corporation shootings of 1998.

I suppose Connecticut is no different from anywhere else, but it does seem like we live alongside a lot of senseless tragedy. Malloy was mayor of Stamford on the day in September 2001 when the commuters didn’t come home.

And then we sent people to places like Afghanistan and Iraq to kill other people. And some of the people we sent were killed.

It’s probably pretty much the same here and in Kabul. Somebody comes to your door and says some words that cleave your life into before and after.

I was one of the journalists who covered the Sandy Hook story 10 years ago. I had no idea what I was covering. Nobody did. I still don’t. But I know a little better.

In the summer of 2020, there was something wrong with my son. They kept doing tests and surgeries, and the news just got worse. The hospitals were sealed because of the pandemic. When he went in, his parents stayed out.

Four months later, the woman with whom I share a life went in the hospital for something that didn’t seem that dire. She did not come out for 10 and a half months. She swung close to the dark cliff of death many times. I could not

You could take this whole miserable anniversary and push it off the highest cliff and into the darkest air, as far as I’m concerned. But if you did, it would come wafting back up through the black night and land at your feet

visit her for months.

One night, when it seemed she would die, she called me to say goodbye. We have been so happy, her weak voice said. I will never shake that moment out of myself. Maybe I never want to.

They are both alive, improbably. Much has been lost. Much has been salvaged.

“There is a vast divide between you and the outer world.” That is what it says in “How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed,” an elaborate workbook about grief by Megan Devine. “And now is when you need other grievers: people who can look at you and truly see, really recognize, the devastation at the core of your life.”

In June of 2021, I decided to do a radio show about grief. This was, in many ways, a poor decision. I invited Devine and one other guest. The show was live. I tried to explain why I was doing it, and I began to cry on the air.

The other guest came on and began to piece me back together.

“Thank you for sharing that with me, with us, today,” she said. “The only way we can bring awareness to this thing that is grief and living with grief is if we share our stories. But all too often we are reluctant to share them.”

She went on. She was quite remarkable. I just listened again for the first time in almost 18 months. She talked about “our natural need to find solutions,” which makes us trumpet resilience and recovery long before such things are truly imaginable. If they ever are.

The woman was Nelba Marquez-Greene, mother of Ana Grace, a little girl who died at Sandy Hook.

There is something almost superhuman about what she did, but the way she acquired that superpower was through beholding a chasm of blood and death and facing a pain that will never, ever recede.

It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.

Well, it’s a life, anyway. No. It’s a good life. They don’t turn off the moon or take the sunset away. You have a dog who makes you laugh, and you can smell chicken in the slow cooker. There are people to love, and maybe even some good work you can do.

Before is gone. After is what we’ve got.