By Michael Morse
In a small Connecticut town, a week or so after Dec. 25, 2012, I sat at my cousin‘s dining room table with Caroline and Madison.
The meal was through, the adults were scattered throughout the house and it was just the girls, my wife and me. For years we have been getting together after the holidays to celebrate Serbian Christmas.
It‘s a day I look forward to all year, a time for extended family and friends to share whatever is left of the holiday spirit, relax, and catch up, and carry on some of the traditions that my wife‘s cousin’s family took with them from the Orthodox Christian Church celebrations in Serbia.
The Christmas season was over, but for me and just about everybody close to me it had never begun. Every moment of joy that year was shrouded with the pain that began on Dec. 14 in Newtown Conn., a sleepy little town much like the one we were in. I wondered how Christmas would ever come again to the people whose lives were shattered that day.
On Dec. 12 of that year, I sat with 300 police officers, FBI and ATF agents, TSA staff, bomb squads and fire department personnel at a conference sponsored by FEMA. The subject of the presentation was preventing and/or responding to school shootings and bomb threats. I learned a lot that day, most notably how we are pretty much at the mercy of what the retired Connecticut State Trooper who gave the lecture described as the “lone wolf.”
“If somebody gets it in their head to do damage, there‘s damn little we can do to stop him,” the trooper said.
I‘ll never forget those words. Neither will my little cousins, and they never heard the words spoken aloud. They spent the day of the shootings inside two elementary school classrooms that are located less than 50 miles from Sandy Hook.
Through children’s eyes
I was busy running errands during the shooting and rescue operations. I wrestled with my own demons as the events of that day unfolded — listening to news updates, shaking my head, pounding the steering wheel as the body count rose and ignoring horns as green lights turned red and I missed them.
It never occurred to me what it was like to be a child in Connecticut as news leaked out, and fear rose and the reality that things had changed for good seeped in.
The joy we had managed to create during the day drained from the kid‘s eyes, their lips trembled, their voices went low and they told us about their day.
That day.
“Our teacher was acting strange,” Madison said. “Her phone became more important than the lessons. ‘Something is going on,’ she said to us, and kept looking at the phone she had placed on her desk. She couldn‘t teach. We found out her nephew was at a school where somebody had a gun.”
“From 10 till noon my teacher didn’t know what was happening. Nobody knew who would live and who would die. She told us to go home and watch the news. That was before the officials told her how to handle things,” said Caroline, wise well beyond her 9 years.
And my little cousins, 9 and 13, left their safe little Connecticut classrooms when their day was done, and went home, where CNN and Fox and MSNBC plays all day most days, and watched footage from the school a few towns over.
Christmas was over
They told me every detail. The killer’s name, the kind of gun he used, how many rounds were fired, how Victoria saved her students, how the principal tried to stop the maniac, how they would have survived had the gunman come to their school.
Or not.
The story flowed, tentatively at first, then uncontrolled, like a deep wound that starts to bleed slowly, then pours freely, building momentum until the blood is gone, and the victim is exhausted.
They knew the murderer had killed his mother, knew that she died in her bed, knew that he shot his way through the school‘s secured door, knew that all the precautions in the world will not keep them safe, knew things that no child needs to know.
They wondered why a 20-year-old kid had an assault weapon in the first place, and what he could possibly use it for, other than to kill people.
Christmas was over, and life for us went on. We sat at the dinner table and listened to two Connecticut schoolgirls tell their story.
Hearing it from the mouths of people whose days are spent in a classroom, much like the killing ground, chilled me to the bone. I fought back tears as they spoke, eloquently and heroically, and with more feeling and raw emotion that I thought possible.
The moment ended, and their dad came back and told them they spoke well, but it was enough. It was obvious that care and love were in abundance in their home, and the girls were able to process the massacre to the best of their ability. But the wounds will never heal.
The adults resumed their places at the table, and the girls went to play with their Wii. They had some crazy dance game on and were mimicking the moves on the screen, and I heard them laughing over the music from the other room.
I tried to pay attention to our conversation, mercifully steered away from Sandy Hook, but I could not. All I could think of was the little kids that will never tell their stories of horror, fear, abandonment and pain, and how they would never play again or dance.
But life for us went on, and Serbian Christmas continued well into the night, long after we put the kids to bed, where they slept and dreamed. Alone.
