Grief

What happened on Friday in Newton, CT did not happen to us. While twenty beautiful babies who were just growing into their feet were mowed down for no reason other than a severely mentally ill person had access to guns, my own baby was sitting safely in his classroom, practicing his math. Although a six-year-old child named Engel was killed that day, it was not my six-year-old child named Engel.

I am not entitled to any of those families' grief. And yet, I grieve. I grieve for them, I grieve for our nation, I grieve for every child who learned that day that they are not safe in their schools.

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I am heartened by the response of our president and many of our politicians to this tragedy  I am hopeful that we will, finally, as a nation, take a good hard look at our guns laws and begin to question the sanity of allowing regular people to own military-style automatic weapons. I am hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of these types of massacres. I pray that my son will live out his long life without ever once having to worry about being shot in a mall, in a movie theater, in his classroom. I will fight, I will vote, I will donate, I will scream to anyone who will listen to help make it so.

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I don't know how the families who lost their children will recover. I know with almost pure certainty that I would not survive a similar loss. The only small comfort I can take from this horror is the vision of each one of those beautiful babies being folded into a loving God's warm embrace. I hope that this image is one that the families hold of their babies as well. I pray they can get some small comfort from it, too.