The Importance of Grieving after a Tragedy Like Sandy Hook

In Memory of those lost at Sandy Hook 12/14/12

When I lost my mother recently, I learned an important lesson.  I had been taught how to cope, how to survive, how to move on.  But I had never learned how to grieve, how to stay with the pain, how to deal with a pain that takes a long time to go away, and never really goes away completely.  I am always hesitant to talk about or give advice on how to talk to kids about things like this, I am not a parent, a psychologist a scholar, a teacher or any other adult who has a great deal of experience with kids.

I am also aware that many deal with pain and grief in different ways and that there is no right way to grieve, suffer or deal with the loss of someone close to you.  So I will talk about my experiences as a child and an adult witnessing and dealing with loss and pain.  About my coming to the understanding that facing pain, difficult situations and being honest about what happened is important for me in dealing with loss.   About how when something like this happens we want to just keep doing things to keep ahead of the pain, but what we don't know is that the pain will catch up with us eventually. 

I grew up in Italy a country with possibly more petty crime, but much less violent crime than the US.  Not that there was not violent crime, but that crime was mostly as a result of crime families and often was not directed at the general citizenry.  However, that changed with the start of a series of terrorist attacks, some home grown, some from outside the country.

Two attacks hit close to home, one targeted an the school bus belonging to an American ex patriot school, our school (similar but based on a British curriculum), was also put on high alert.  I recall being worried, but feeling somewhat safe, as the adults around us explained what was going on, what was being done and how we should behave to keep us safe.

The second was an attack at an airport that my family went through often on our trips outside the country, I knew that a friend of mine missed being at the airport during the attack by just minutes, and for years after I would look up and see the bullet holes in the top balcony that for some reason were never repaired.  A constant reminder that the world was not as safe a place as one would like.

The main thing about both those incidents was that even kids were given information about what happened, there was conversation between adults, adults and kids and between kids.  It was scary, but we all knew what happened and we all knew what was going on.

A few years later a young boy was abducted, raped and killed.  I knew that boy, not well but I had interacted with him during a riding school camp that we both participated in earlier that year.  I remember him thinking that the way I half held my hands in my pants pockets was cool.  He was a quiet, introverted, cute and sweet kid.

When he was killed, the school kept everything very quiet for a while, rumors spread, some of them not true, but many of them remarkably true.  Somewhere the decision was made to carry on as usual, rather than to mourn.  So we did, school went on, Christmas went on and us kids had no choice but to go on with it.  I remember being deeply disturbed by something so horrific happening to someone I knew, and the odd normalcy of my daily routine at school.   It felt, off and it felt wrong. 

A similar thing happened to a girl that once again I befriended during one of those spring camps, she was in a different class, so once we got back from camp we did not see each other that much.  Kids, came and went in our school often, many kids there had parents stationed in Rome for just a few years.  So when I did not see her for a while, I assumed that she had left with her family.

What I eventually learned through another student, was that she had died, from something that up until then I never thought you could die from, asthma!  I also learned that her father had died just the year before, I can only imagine what the mother must have been going through. By the time I learned of her death it was too late to attend the funeral, too late to tell her mother how much I had liked and respected her daughter.  Too late to really grieve for the loss of my friend.  

I had a similar feeling more recently during the attacks of September 11, I was in college at that time and again the university went on as normal, there was no official acknowledgement from the university of what happened, no mass grieving, just an odd sense of business as usual.  I had that same odd feeling of disconnect, the feeling that something very tragic had happened, but that we did not have time to stop and grieve, that we just kept on, kept moving on.

When my mother died, I finally understood that for me, to stop and grieve is important.  I need to deal with the pain and the sorrow and just be with it for a while.  Everyone is different, and I don't know if knowing more about these events hurts or helps other kids who are not like me.  I am not the expert.  I am just another voice out there, talking about her own experiences.

This will be my last post on Sandy Hook, and I know there are no graphs and data in this post, these are just my thoughts, my personal view on the situation.  Sometimes, feelings and emotions without data are just as important, as long as we don't make laws, policy and societal movments from them, without going back to the data to make sure our emotions are in the right place.