Twenty more chairs should be filled at the Newtown High School graduation ceremony on Wednesday night.
Twenty more names should be called as loved ones cheer the graduates on, 20 more tassels turned after walking across the stage, 20 more diplomas accepted, met with embraces from waiting families, and six more educators should be beaming proudly from the audience.
For the students who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as first graders in 2012, Wednesday marks the end of high school. More than 11 years after a gunman tore through their first-grade classrooms, the new graduates have grappled with what this milestone means: A finish line they are crossing that their classmates never will. They will never know what their classmates would have become, or how their lives would have intersected in ways big and small.
For Sandy Hook shooting survivors, CT high school graduation is a ‘bittersweet’ milestone
At a rally for gun violence prevention a few days before the commencement, former Sandy Hook Elementary School librarian Cindy Carlson offered a hint at the unknown.
She wondered aloud whether the books those first graders once read could give insight into who they would be today, and who they might have become had they lived.
“Maybe the library books they checked out of the Sandy Hook school library were clues,” she said. “Was the boy who checked out books about construction trucks destined to be a successful engineer? Or would the girl who loved to read about horses, have been an accomplished equestrian? We won’t know.”
But “the library books told us what might have been,” she said, and “we mourn what those 20 kids could have been and should have been.”
A tragic ending
For 26 people inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, life stopped on Dec. 14, 2012. And for everyone else in Newtown, it changed forever.
In between final exams and the exciting hallmarks of a high schooler’s senior year, groups of survivors gave speeches, called U.S. senators, and went as far as the White House to share their stories and push for change as they have for years. Their high school experiences have been intertwined with gun violence vigils and lobbying sessions on Capitol Hill.
It’s work they wish they never had to do, but won’t give up on. They want to save students from bullets, their loved ones from lifetimes of grief and everyone who might someday know the victims from instead experiencing their absence.
Matt Holden, a graduating senior who survived the shooting, has been on a journey of understanding grief since the first grade.
“Grief, the way I describe it, is it’s not defined by the moments that you can see but by the moments that you can’t,” he said
“You can always see the moments when someone’s crying at the memorial or something like that, but every single day there are a thousand moments that you don’t even think about, where they should be here,” Holden added. “The empty seat at the lunch table, or the kid you don’t see in the halls, that’s what really defines it.
“Some people who didn’t even meet these kids, who went to another school in town, are affected by this. Not because they knew them, but because they should have. Because we all should have gotten to know them better than we did.”
Holden and his classmates never want to forget their friends.
“They should still be here and that’s the greatest tragedy of all,” Holden said.
And Carlson’s sentiments at the rally echoed that notion.
She remembers wrapping a rubber band around the stack of 20 library cards for students who died, tucking them into a desk drawer until it felt right to give them to parents “who were desperate for remembrances of their children.”
Emma Ehrens often thinks of Jesse Lewis, her first-grade classmate who was killed that day. When Ehrens’ class was confronted by the gunman, his gun momentarily jammed. At that moment, Lewis — a fan of all things military and toy soldiers — recognized the jam and the time it bought them, and he told Ehrens to run. She listened, as did others, and they survived.
Lewis was shot shortly after. He is remembered as a hero.
Lewis’ mom, Scarlett Lewis, said she thinks her son would be in the military now.
“I always have thought, even when he was alive, that he would join the military,” she said. “I believe he would have risen to the highest rank because even at 6 years old, he had this incredible amount of courage that is now inspiring people around the world to stand up and do the right thing,” she said.
Lewis runs the Choose Love Movement, a non-profit that follows a directive Jesse left on a kitchen chalkboard before he left for school the morning he was killed, the words “nurturing, healing, love,” sprawled in his writing.
It’s the message she shares in countless classrooms around the globe — that children and adults need to embrace both good and bad experiences to learn, heal, love and nurture each other. And it is a poignant piece of advice for this year’s graduates.
“Every difficulty that you face enables you to have what you need for the next,” Lewis said. “We are created to grow through challenges, roadblocks, to move through fear and use it to live our best lives, not in spite of what happens to us, but because of it.”
When tragedy strikes, she said, so does remarkable change.
“When there’s so much pain, there’s so much desperation, that’s when we kind of wrangle the courage for a shift, and the shift is now.”
Jenny Hubbard, the mother of Catherine Violet Hubbard, sat in the animal sanctuary dedicated to her daughter days before what would have been her 18th birthday last week.
When she should have been planning a graduation party, she hosted an annual fundraiser for the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary to benefit the safe space for animals, insects and humans that has flourished in her daughter’s honor.
Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden, whose sons Dylan Hockley and Daniel Barden were killed at Sandy Hook, continue to advocate for resources to prevent shootings through their work at Sandy Hook Promise.
Their organization offers resources to identify signs of violence and isolation and intervene to stop school shootings.
Standing at a podium in Newtown days before the graduation, Hockley’s voice broke as she spoke of Dylan, who died in the arms of his teacher Anne Marie Murphy when the gunman tore into their classroom.
“This is a hard month because there should be twenty more kids graduating. Dylan should be graduating. And (principal) Dawn (Hochsprung) and the others should all be here watching them graduate.”
Hockley commended her son’s classmates for their bold activism and the hope they inspire — a hope that drives her to continue to put in the work to prevent school shootings.
“I remain hopeful because we know what works, I remain hopeful because this movement continues to grow, and I remain hopeful because of these kids,” she said, gesturing to the surviving students.
“This is the generation that has grown up knowing nothing but school shootings,” she said. “This is the generation that will not let that be the future for their children.”
While she wishes her son was joining them in their caps and gowns, Hockley said she knows the young activists working alongside her will make even more of an impact as they graduate and enter adulthood. And she hopes the adults in the gun violence prevention movement will continue to guide and support them.
“As they become 18 years old, as they start voting, as they start using their voices in even more powerful ways, this is the face of change,” she said. “And we should stand and let them be on our shoulders at all times.”
A change for the future
Newtown Action Alliance leaders Po Murray and Carol Wakeman have led many students in their first years of activism with the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, a students’ chapter of the group.
Murray, who spoke to the Hartford Courant between meetings with the White House, said, “You can really see the trajectory of their lives has been significantly changed by the tragedy that happened.”
They carry the trauma, the anger, the sadness and the frustration of what they have experienced with them every day, along with the memories of the too few years they had with their friends. And they will continue to carry it, the good and the bad, wherever they go.
They will carry it with them to New York and Rhode Island to study law, to Washington, D.C. to study politics, to Pennsylvania to study psychology and to UConn to continue advocating.
A group of seniors who survived the shooting — Ehrens, Holden, Ella Seaver, Lilly Wasilnak, Henry Terifay and Grace Fischer — went to the White House last week to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.
When they walked into the White House, Waslinak said some heads turned, wondering what a group of children were doing there.
“We know we have our place there, we have just as much of a right to be here,” she said.
Speaking directly to lawmakers who oppose their work, she said: “You may have a position that puts you higher than us, but we’re coming for it.”
Her classmates clapped, just as they did when Holden said that when he met Harris at the White House last week, he asked for a job.
They plan to keep asking, to keep calling on lawmakers to shape a different reality for future generations. And if they don’t, the newly minted high school graduates are going to step in. They’re going to run in local elections, for Congress, for even higher offices.
The students, though proud of their work, are furious and frustrated that their childhoods were spent fighting for what they think America’s lawmakers should be doing to protect them.
But their time is up, the survivors feel, and now it is their turn.
At the recent rally, Carlson spoke directly to the seniors standing beside her.
“On behalf of the entire town I want to say what an honor it has been to bear witness to your resilience and how far you have come,” she said.
“As a community, we can’t unwrite the story of what happened on Dec. 14, 2012, but we can work together and be inspired by this group of young adults to make sure that more kids achieve the dreams that they kindle in the pages of elementary school library books.”
Over the weekend, Jenny Hubbard celebrated Catherine’s Butterfly Party, invoking her passion for animals as monarch butterflies floated by, named “Catherine’s butterfly” for the day. The night before, Nicole Hockley spoke about gun violence prevention as a gold butterfly pendant hung from her neck — a reminder of Dylan.
As she honors Jesse, Scarlett Lewis wants her son’s friends — and everyone else – to know that they will flourish because of what they have survived.
“A butterfly needs to go into the cocoon and struggle in order to fly away, but also to become beautiful inside and out,” she said. “We are beautiful and strong because of the struggle, not despite it.”
