DIED 1966, 1999, 2007, 2012, 2018 . . .
IN THE CURRENT ISSUE of People magazine, it is sandwiched between “What Went Wrong Between Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux” and “Amy Schumer’s Surprise Wedding.” A two-page spread of a candlelight vigil, followed by the now-familiar story. The fire drill at the end of the school day. The gunshots, the text messages, the SWAT team. People doubled over, people covering their faces, people wailing into cell phones. I don’t know what hell is like but it can’t be worse than what I saw at that school. The roll call of the dead, their glowing faces and miniature biographies: a sports career, a college scholarship, a love of the beach, a smile as bright as a firecracker. I don’t blame People magazine for this. It is the news, it is what happens, right in the middle of everything.
More often than not it is one of my children who first tells me there has been a mass shooting. Mom, I think something terrible happened in Colorado. In Virginia. In Las Vegas. In Florida. At the country music festival, the elementary school, the college campus, the nightclub, the church. The Amish schoolhouse. The Jewish community center. The mosque. The movie theater. The high school.
It’s the image of children crossing a parking lot as if in a conga line, hands on shoulders, wearing the colorful jackets and bright, clean sneakers their mothers sent them to school in, that haunts me. Just as kids used to practice what to do in case of fire or nuclear attack, they now learn the correct procedures in case of mass murder. Get under the desk. Get in the closet. Stay away from the windows. Run. Our president has a suggestion: more guns. More yellow tape, more candles, more flowers. Teddy bear stock is on the rise.
To be a parent is to have your heart go walking around outside your body, as the writer Elizabeth Stone put it. At every moment, it is exactly as terrifying as you can tolerate. There is so much you have to turn away from just to get through a day. Now the eerie conga line files through our dreams. The phone rings. This is too much to ask of us.