Crazy for Bread
Since Dec. 14, 2012, not a day has gone by without missing, loving, grieving, recalling, imagining you, little Noah. If on that terrible day, an armed maniac hadn’t broken into your school in peaceful Sandy Hook, CT, killing everyone on sight, you would be 17.
You had just turned six.
Nothing has been the same since.
Our grandson Noah Pozner lost his life in Sandy Hook on Dec. 14, 2012. He had just turned six.
Ten years on, he is both unequivocally gone and vividly present. Nobody knows it better than his mother, my daughter Veronique De La Rosa. And what better way to honor his memory on this tenth anniversary than to ask her to talk about him.
“Noah’s earthbound story was over before he had time to finish writing the first chapter. And in such an unspeakable way that I don’t have the words to talk about it.
So his story has become my story, in turns wings or anvil, depending upon the day, sometimes the hour.
Every bit of joy happens for me through his eyes, which now gaze through mine. I gather these instants of happiness and string them up like so many pearls, to have and to hold on the anvil days, when the heaviness does not allow for tears.
Nothing has changed in ten years. Picture throwing a smooth round pebble down an ancient well, waiting for that dull echoey sound letting you know it has made contact with whatever is at the bottom. Here I am, waiting for my grief to make that sound. The closure, the conclusion, the finale of it.
I now understand that will never happen and I hold that knowledge in peace.
I cherish Noah’s memory, I cherish the immense privilege of having known him at all, of having been his Mom and of knowing that I loved him fiercely, not because I was supposed to but because I just effortlessly did.
He was a content, compassionate and generous little boy. I always felt his concern for others was an an innate byproduct of being a twin. He saw the world with a sense of curiosity and wonder, with many questions as to the why and how of things.
He was also a jokester who delighted in teasing his sisters. I recall him telling them that while they were both fast asleep at night, he would sneak off to his third shift job as a supervisor in a taco factory. I have no idea how or why he came up with that, but it drove both girls bonkers as they repeatedly attempted to stay awake in order to catch him leaving for “work”.
His favorite colors were blue and yellow and he truly believed in superheroes and in their powers to save the world from the brink of destruction. He loved to wear his vast collection of superhero shirts, and had a special fondness for Spider-Man and Iron Man. He followed their exploits in cartoons, movies and comic books.
He was also lover of animals and nature and an adventurous gourmand. He was all that and so much more, because everything that he could have been as he grew older never came to pass.
In spite of my aching sadness, I celebrate Noah’s spirit, his constant presence in my heart and life. He is free. Untethered. Impalpable. Yet also changeless and steadfast.
In truth, Noah is eternal.”
As Veronique’s mother and Noah’s grandma, it breaks my heart to know that six short years together is all they had.
Nine years have gone by since the Sandy Hook massacre that took our grandson Noah’s life and the lives of 25 others, including 19 kids and 6 educators. He had turned 6 three weeks earlier.
That day will remain branded in my memory until the day I die. It isn’t in my power to change any of it, to go back in time wishing for a snow day or for a pandemic that would have closed schools and given the killer time to reflect and stand down. Sometimes I even wish guiltily that Noah had had a fever and stayed home. But then I think of the other victims and I know it is no good. Nothing can change what happened.
The grief hasn’t changed either. I have been told that you learn to live with it, and that’s true, but I have also been told that after a few years it would morph into something different, more manageable, more « reasonable. » Well, I am here to tell you it hasn’t. And I don’t expect it to. In fact I don’t want it to. As long as I feel heavy with longing and pain, I know love is alive.
What has changed over the years is Noah. In my mind’s (heart’s) eyes, he is now your typical teenager (he would have turned 15 last month,) tall, with a sweep of thick glossy dark hair, luminous eyes, eyelashes any girl would envy and a quick tongue. Maybe he has a girlfriend, maybe he is rebellious, maybe he plays an instrument, maybe he doesn’t like school, maybe he wants to be a marine biologist or an influencer on TikTok. We’ll never know because his future was stolen.
From him, from us.
He would be playing video games with his sisters and his many cousins. There would be visits back and forth. Strong ties would be woven across the continent.
Instead, there is a Noah-shaped hole in the fabric of our lives and it won’t ever be mended.
Noah
(Photo courtesy of my daughter Veronique, his mom)
We lost our grandson Noah in the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14, 2012. He was 5 on the above picture. He was killed three weeks after he turned 6.
Five years ago as I was walking at the edge of the surf (we now live near the coast), I was thinking that it had been months since I had last dreamed of Noah or seen any « signs » of him. What I call a « sign » is something unusual in the outside world that makes me hope that Noah is still around somehow, somewhere, if only in spirit.
Almost as soon as the melancholy thought crossed my mind, the ocean washed up a boy’s sneaker a few feet in front of me.
The shoe was full of sand and of course dripping wet, but it looked new. It was the size shoe a boy of about 8 or 9 would have worn. Noah would have been that age by then. I didn’t pick it up or otherwise touch it. But I took a picture and walked on, both shaken and comforted. When I retraced my steps half-an-hour later, the sneaker was gone.
The whole thing was pure coincidence. Sure. But when you have lost someone very close to you, you live for these coincidences. Sometimes you call them « signs. » At least, I do.
This year, all around the world, whole families are caught in a web of absence woven by the pandemic: cold pillows, empty chairs, stilled phones, muted voices, silenced footfalls, and abandoned clothes, books and favorite things. For too many of us, gone are the hand in ours, the arm on our shoulders, the cuddle, the patient ear, the face at the window when we come home. We hurt and we grieve.
Even when we don’t personally know someone who died of COVID, we watch, hear or read the news, we talk to friends. Last week in one single day the virus killed more people in the US than died on 9/11. And so many of us are learning to live with traumatic grief that it feels almost like an indulgence to recall those who were murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting of December 14, 2012.
But grief is grief. Some say it gets easier with time. And maybe it does. But it has been my experience that it isn’t the case when death is random, sudden, brutal.
I know I will never resign myself to Noah’s death. Even after eight years his absence is gutting. I miss him, his eyes, his smile, his impishness. I miss the everyday and I miss the milestones, I miss seeing him with his four siblings, I miss the man he would have become, I miss the life partner he might have met and the kids they might have had. I just plain miss him.
Grief sometimes feels so heavy and cumbersome that it stands in your way like a boulder and you find yourself stuck in front of it, trampling the same ground over and over, ensnared in a web of absence.
The image isn’t mine. I found it recently in a novel by Maggie O’Farrell and it stuck a chord. Yes, since Noah’s death, our family has indeed been struggling in the tendrils of such a web.
The novel, Hamnet, is centered on the death of a boy and the family upheaval that followed. The boy’s name was Hamnet (or Hamlet, apparently the spelling was interchangeable in the 16th century) and his father was William Shakespeare. Like Noah, he was a fraternal twin.
The story is partly based on a historic fact: Shakespeare did have a son named Hamnet who died in Stratford-upon-Avon at the age of 11. The cause of his death is unknown. In the novel he succumbs to the plague.
O’Farrell imagines the path the plague followed to Stratford. Her description is riveting. Such a random chain of events, both avoidable and unavoidable. The bacillus came as stealthily to the little town as the killer who found his way to the Sandy Hook Elementary School eight years ago on that fateful Friday morning.
As long as I live, I will be haunted by the thought of this dead soul parking his car and approaching the school, determined to murder everyone within its walls. He had enough ammunition with him and if his weapon hadn’t jammed, he might well have succeeded.
As long as I live, I won’t forget either that this terrible day could have been worse: two of our granddaughters, Noah’s twin and his older sister, were there too. But they were in another part of the building and thus, by sheer luck, they were spared.
Like COVID today, the plague was blind. In the fictional Shakespeare family, it was on course to kill Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith. But like Noah’s, Hamnet’s sisters both survived. Hamnet didn’t, even though Judith had been of fragile health and he had been the strong and healthy one.
After his death, the family was torn apart. Mourning the same beloved little boy, they felt isolated and cut off from one another, unable to understand or even simply accept that grief could take different shapes for each of them. Tempers flared. Misunderstandings, resentment and rifts followed. I’ll say no more for fear of revealing too much of the plot.
But this I will say: vicariously living through this fictional family’s tragedy helped me understand how come our own family had nearly imploded at the very time when we needed each other the most.
The night after I finished the novel, I dreamed of Noah for the first time in months. In my dream, he was a teenager. Just as he would be today if he had lived. I was crossing a high school cafeteria and he was sitting at a long table among other kids. I knew him right away. He didn’t see me. He was pensive, his face bathed with light and if I had to describe him in one word, I would say he looked serene. He still had his extraordinary eyes and his very long eyelashes. Even my dream I knew it couldn’t be Noah since he was dead. Yet I also knew it was him. I woke up.
Our family has been through difficult times since 2012 but over the course of this past year, the ground has shifted. The boulder blocking the path forward has moved. An opening has appeared. I am neither a spiritual nor a religious person. But I am a firm believer in the power of love. Noah was a loving little soul. He adored his parents and his siblings and they adored him back. Nothing and nobody in the world was more important to him. Except maybe Angry Birds, tacos, gangnam style dancing and playing tricks. Why, a few days before the shooting he had been banned from the cafeteria and made to eat lunch with a teacher all week because he wouldn’t stop messing with other kids’ lunches. By her account the teacher had a great time spending lunch time with Noah and I heard he had too. What we will never know is whether or not he would have been deterred from annoying the other kids again once the banishment lifted…
On Monday I will light a candle and place it in the window in memory of Noah. I will light one for his classmates and for the educators who died at the school on that awful day as well as for the millions of victims of gun violence everywhere.
I will also light one for those who died of COVID. I am so very sorry to see their families and friends join the ranks of the traumatically bereaved.
Finally because even dead souls were alive once and beloved and nurtured, for the first time in eight years, I might also light a candle for the lost and violent boy and for the mother he killed before making his way to the school.
I can’t bear to say or write his name but I think of him now and then, always with a shudder. I suspect that on that tragic day he was ripped inside by both an icy despair and a burning hatred and that madness drove him to try and inflict the same pain on others. It is probably a stretch to think he has found peace.
But I believe Noah has.
It has been seven years. Noah has now lived longer in our memories than in the flesh.
Seven years since a dark soul carried a semiautomatic rifle into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered everyone in his sights, including twenty first-graders and six educators.
Our grandson Noah had turned six three weeks before. We lived near Seattle at the time and I had flown cross-country just before Thanksgiving to be with him and his twin sister on their birthday. It would be the last time I would see him in person although one of my most precious memories is chatting with him on Skype a couple of nights before he and his classmates were mown down.
The red-eye flight back East on the evening of December 14 took place in an agony of disbelief. I can’t remember whether or not I managed to slumber but I do remember an enormous weight pressing down on my ribcage and a burning sensation in my chest.
When we got back home to the Northwest at the end of January, our house was exactly as we had left it mid-December: half-ready for Christmas. The stepladder was still up in the hall where hubby had been attaching red and white garlands; the tree had turned brown and brittle; ornaments had slid off the drooping branches and shattered on the floor; eleven little cardboard windows remained unopened on the advent calendar.
The holiday decorations were swiftly put away, not to be taken out for a few years. It would be an understatement to say that we were done with Christmas. We still are.
But our youngest grandkids eventually reached an age where they would notice and ask questions. We took the Christmas boxes out of storage again. And so it happens that every year when I open them, I find the stockings.
I don’t put them up anymore as I couldn’t bear taking out all of them but one.
And we no longer put up a big tree. Just a tiny symbolic one.
When I last saw Noah on Skype, he and his sisters were trimming their own tree back home. They were taking ornaments out of boxes, exclaiming over each one, running to the computer to show me, then running to the tree to hang them.
At one point, Noah found himself alone in front of the camera. I could hear his sisters chatting excitedly by the tree in the background. He sat uncharacteristically quiet, looking at me. I had zero premonition but I remember a stirring in my soul as if, in the silence, something had been said and acknowledged.
I used to love Christmas. Now it is a relief to put everything away again as soon as the holiday is over.
Gun violence isn’t a statistic. It isn’t abstract. It isn’t political.
Families hit by gun violence are force-shaped around a gigantic hole, an abyss of loss and longing. They don’t ever recover. Not really. We may still laugh, sing, revel and rejoice. But inside, we bleed.
After seven years, Noah hasn’t become an abstraction. I think about him every day of my life and I watch him grow. He was six when I last saw him. He’d be thirteen today.
Everywhere I go, I see the gleam of his pensive, luminous and mischievous eyes. There is nothing creepy about it, Noah isn’t a ghost, he is a presence. And a comforting one.
Even the grief is welcome. If it had started to assuage, then it would mean I would have started to forget. There is no chance of that.
My mom lost her first baby thirty-six hours after his birth. He had been a beautiful seven-pound little boy and just like that, he was gone. He had been born at home, as was then the custom in provincial France. The birth had been attended both by a midwife and by the local doctor. It had been uneventful and both the mom and the baby had been doing well. Nobody ever had any explanation for why he stopped breathing.
All her life my mom cried whenever she spoke of her lost little boy and in her final hour he was the only one whose name she still remembered. I know, I was there, and I am the one who uttered his name. She was a few months shy of her ninety-sixth birthday.
One doesn’t get over the death of a child. Or grandchild.
Is it worse when the child is murdered inside his classroom by a killer bent on inflicting maximum pain onto the largest possible number of families? I can’t say. I don’t believe a scale exists to measure the pain of losing a kid.
But I can tell you that had Noah died in his bed, the last seconds of his life wouldn’t have been filled with deafening noises, blood and terror. And I can also tell you that no parent or grandparent should have to live with that thought.
That is the reality of gun violence. Not an abstraction. Not a statistic. Sure there are numbers. But each and everyone of them represents a brutal ending, a gaping hole. Stunned and broken families stand around these holes in ever expanding circles of anguish and grief. The trauma never heals. It goes down the generations. A legacy of pain, anxiety and dysfunction.
Not a statistic. No.
What happened to Noah and nineteen other first graders in a peaceful little New England town ten days before Christmas seven years ago could happen to a kid you love.
To your kid. To your grandkid.
Today. Tomorrow. Anytime. Anywhere
I don’t know how to prevent it. But I know we can’t just sit tight and hold our breath. Or stick our heads in the sand.
On this seventh anniversary of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary school and in memory of Noah, of his classmates and of his educators, I beg you to consider doing something if you do not do so already.
Joining Moms Demand Action would be good place to start.
And today would be a good time.
Thank you.