My wife, Terry, and I vividly remember our first Christmas season in Newtown 16 years ago (1996). One never knows when a moment of levity will give way to a shoulder-shaking bout of grief. We're all processing the contacts, the anguish, the shattered lives in our own ways.įor those fortunate to have not lost a loved one, Christmas will carry extra meaning and be shrouded in unexpected emotion: tears, tight hugs and distant stares. I'd met the mother of the shooter, though I didn't even know she had children. A friend of mine drove a Sandy Hook school bus and had transported children who would die in the shooting. It seems that most everyone in this town of 27,000 knew someone either directly or indirectly traumatized last Friday. The pastor broke down in tears this man of God who was comforting others then cried on the congregation's collective shoulder. They had contacted him, seeking comfort and assurance that their baptized child would go to heaven. This past Sunday, the pastor relayed a story of a family who lost a child in the shooting. The church is decorated for this normally joyous season on the Christian calendar. We'll attend Christmas Eve service at Christ the King Lutheran Church, a congregation - like others throughout Newtown - scarred by the massacre.
My family - and we presume most local families - will find a way to celebrate the holiday. Yet few in this scenic southwestern Connecticut town straight out of a Hallmark card or a Norman Rockwell painting are going to abandon a holiday with so much meaning: the birth of Jesus, a season of hope, a chance to live anew. People are skipping long-ago-planned Christmas parties, and others are surely behind on holiday shopping - events and things that held weight just a week ago but seem trivial today.
I drove back to our Aurora hotel where family gathered for a wedding, thinking how lucky my two children - Kristin, then 19, and Ben, 18 - were to grow up in Newtown, where violent crime usually meant teenage mischief-makers bashing mailboxes late at night.įour months after our family trip to Aurora, my family and all of Newtown feel the deep and wrenching pain suffered in that Colorado city as we watch hearse after hearse travel through our streets. One disturbed person armed to the teeth with evil intent had shattered and tainted a city in the Denver suburbs in July.
#CHARMAS IN NEWTOWN MOVIE#
Stepping gingerly around makeshift memorials across the street from the Aurora, Colo., movie theater where a month before 12 people were murdered and 58 wounded, I mentioned to my daughter how awful it was that such a lively community might forever have a killing-fields reputation. Here's his personal account of life in Newtown. USA TODAY travel reporter Gary Stoller lives in Newtown, Conn., and was one of the first journalists on the scene after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday morning.
0 kommentar(er)
