When my son Charlie was 10 years old, a friend of his in his 4th grade class was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. I remember how I felt when I was told that July about Elizabeth’s fate. I was sick to my stomach, immobilized by fear, unable to separate my own maternal instincts from the reality confronting her parents. When she died the following December, one week before Christmas, the community assembled to memorialize her brief life. We had had 6 months to prepare but still her dying seemed unfathomable
I was thinking about Elizabeth’s death after Friday’s rampage in Newtown, Connecticut. I remembered the profound effect that this single loss had had on everyone in her orbit. Devastating as this was, as ill as she became, as difficult as it was to absorb, it cannot compare to the utter grief perpetrated on December 14 as 26 lives, were obliterated in a matter of minutes. There will never be a viable explanation, no deadly disease was to blame; there was no time to adjust. As a mother I cannot imagine the unbearable pain.
How many times do we fail before we learn? When did we, as a nation, agree to mediocrity? When did we stop demanding results? When did we start blaming others and ignoring our own responsibility to history? We are obligated to our youth to recognize that this county has changed and we must change our laws to accommodate their future. This is vision and without it, we will never find a state of grace.
“The Price Of Greatness is Responsibility” ~ Winston Churchill
