26 angels

I am one of the lucky ones.   I didn’t lose anyone I love.  My children were safe.  They were actually miles away.  But we were affected and I have changed.  That day and that town that borders my small town in rural Connecticut, are now infamous.  No one I knew knew of that town if they didn’t live within 10 miles of it.  Well, they may have heard of it, but they didn’t usually know it.

That town two miles from my driveway is where we go to get ice cream from the farm stand with the grazing cows.  That town my best friend and her family had lived in and where her kids had gone to school until a few months before that fateful December day.  Her 6 year old daughter could have been a victim had they not moved.  That town where we still go to see movies in its town hall.  Where we shop.  Where we visit doctors and dentists.  That town where we played lava tag in the park just minutes from the school.  Or where we swam in the summer in that park.  Or sledded in the winter in that park in that town.  That town that we drive through to get to the highway.  That town we’d bring our bikes and bike around the old mental hospital grounds turned into biking and hiking trails, soccer fields, baseball fields and even indoor playing fields.  That town I have so many connections to. Yet, that town is not my town.  It is not our town.  But it is.  That town where it happened.  That town that everyone now knows.  That town that felt tremendous pain. 

The pain is shared just like our borders. 

We have so many connections to those killed.  Friend of a friend.  Friend’s nephew.  But our connections don’t really matter because we still have our loved ones.  It is hard, yet not as hard as it can be.  Not as hard as the families that lost innocent children or loving adults.

We are connected in so many ways and feel their pain yet spared so much of it.   We are the lucky and we must fight for them.  Our neighbors.  Our friends.  Our family.  Our new found voices.  For the 26.  For the town.  For Newtown.  For Sandy Hook (the town within the town).

Please visit www.sandyhookpromise.org and take the pledge.   And please contact your legislators to get common sense gun legislation passed– like universal background checks.  Don’t let this pain get to your town.  This will happen again if the national laws don’t change.  This will happen again if we don’t change the conversation. 

This is the one subject I will get off-subject for.  Today it was 6 months ago.  Yet I remember what I was doing and who I was doing it with.  How we learned about it.  How we looked around us in case someone was headed our way.  How we called our schools and checked in on our kids.   But as I said, we got good news.  We got our kids back that day.