The Opposite of Numb
Yesterday, sometime between the end of a meeting about office space and an investment committee meeting, I learn of another school shooting, this time in Texas. Walking home across the parking lot after another meeting, I think about needing to write another letter—another letter to my school community about unspeakable horror. I did not write to parents about the shooting Buffalo less than two weeks ago. I worry that all I do is communicate tragedy. But this time, it’s a school. The children are small. The almost cloying scent of French lilacs fills my nostrils. Usually, I love their fragrance, but in the dusk, I think of funeral homes and lilies—their overpowering aroma--and tiny caskets. I think about mothers who kissed their babies goodbye, never thinking that harm would befall them in school. I think about Sophronia Scott’s remarkable essay called Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse, which I read for a graduate school class about a year ago: https://www.timberlinereview.com/why-i-didnt-go-to-the-firehouse-sophfronia-scott/ Her child went to Sandy Hook School on the day of that shooting. I wonder how long it will take me to make sense of another tragedy and who will take care of the teachers in my school who take care of our children every day—whether or not there is a school shooting.
Passing the school buses and heading up our driveway, I think about how much I hate lockdown drills, the fact that we simulate what to do if a gunman came into our school and tried to kill us. I hate being the one to rattle the doorknob. The children have been taught not to let me in. Because you never know. My friend Rob, who knows about security, says we do drills to buy time, seconds even. I became a schoolteacher because I love stories—reading them, telling them, writing them. And I love children. I did not realize that lockdown drills would become part of the routine of school.
Once, during an ALICE training some years ago, I saw the fake gunman aim his Nerf gun at me, and I leapt upon Leighann, the drama teacher in our Upper School, whom I have known since she, herself, was a girl. Her daughter, Olivia, and my son, Atticus, grew up together, had playdates.
“If I cannot save myself,” I thought, “at least I can save Olivia’s mother.” We crashed to the ground, she startled and I, somewhere in between the reality of the drill and the terror of what could be. We laugh about it now, my clumsy impulse to save her life even as I was pelted with Nerf darts.
At home, I go about feeding the pets, ordering dinner, logging into a grad school class. I take refuge in routine, in tasks I can complete automatically. It is 9:00 p.m. before my crisis communication partner, Julie, and I open a Zoom room and face each other. I do not ask my whole leadership team to log in—it is too late and too familiar--but I am grateful when our two Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging experts, Candace and Lauren, join us and our school psychologist, Ilissa. We are efficient, tired, numb. Julie had started the letter and I had edited it during my playwriting class, feeling guilty about my split focus, worrying about a grad school classmate, who lives in Texas, and whose face was drawn during our online class. The letter to families comes together quickly. Too quickly. The resources we share with parents about how to talk to children after a school shooting are easy to locate. Again.
I close the letter with a benediction I love by Henri-Frederic Amiel: “Life is short. We don't have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” It is all I can think to offer. I am out of words.
This morning I speak with my schoolteacher daughter, whose third graders are presenting a play today on Changemakers: Lynn Manuel Miranda, Maya Angelou. Changemakers. Children. I place my hope in the children in our schools who will grow up, demand change.
“What I am most afraid of is growing numb,” I tell my daughter. “Inured. When we stop feeling, allowing ourselves to be affected—that’s when I fear who we will become.”
On the way back across the parking lot to school, I think about all the schoolteachers who brushed their teeth, made coffee, buried their fear, and headed to school to be a reassuring presence in the lives of children who rely on them to smile and offer structure and routine. Teachers are superheroes. They are a different kind of first responders. ‘
The only way to avoid becoming numb is to keep feeling, to allow horror to wash over me. In college, one of my most inspiring professors, Dorothee Metlitski, herself a Holocaust survivor, talked to us in every course I took with her about man’s inhumanity to man.
“What does that mean?” one of my ninth graders asked last week during one of our final English classes.
I turned the question back to her. “What do you think it means?”
“It’s about being cruel, one person to another.”
“Right,” I affirm, “And it’s the most important thing to fight against.”
The young person who killed the children yesterday; the young person who killed people in Buffalo—both were 18 years old. They could buy guns, but not yet drink alcohol. I am the opposite of numb; I am stretched taut like a violin string, like a wire vibrating with fury and impotence. I do not want a world in which children murder children.
