The Lives Unlived in Newtown

The Lives Unlived in Newtown
By SARA MOSLE

 

A memorial near the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
 (Marcus Yam for The New York Times)

ON A COUNTRY HIGHWAY IN THE TINY TOWN OF NEW LONDON, TEX., sits a small tea shop and a museum that houses the collective grief of a community that lost its children. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the London Consolidated School exploded a few minutes before classes were to be dismissed. An odorless cloud of natural gas had leaked from a faulty heating system into the building’s unventilated basement and ignited, most likely from a spark from the school’s shop class.

According to witnesses, the school appeared to blast off its foundation and hover in the air before collapsing again, generating clouds of ash and debris that plowed across the schoolyard. Scores of mothers, who had been attending a P.T.A. meeting in the nearby wood gymnasium, staggered out into a blizzard of whirling papers and pulverized mortar. When the dust settled, approximately 300 people were dead, nearly all of them children.

How does a community recover from such a loss? It’s a question we ask as we struggle to pay tribute to the 20 children and 6 adults massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. This issue of the magazine is devoted to “the lives they lived.” To a parent, the childhood of a 6- or 7-year-old is rich beyond measure. But the incomprehensible horror and grief at the death of a child is also for the milestones not reached, the moments unshared. In Newtown, it’s for the lives unlived we mourn.

For those who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook, the sorrow is beyond our capacity to know or comprehend and will take a lifetime to work out. The year after the 1937 school explosion, a memorial service was canceled because emotions were still too raw. It took another year for the town to erect a cenotaph. Some families sued the school superintendent and school board, as others struggled to forgive and forget. Memory of the tragedy went underground until 1976, when one of the few youthful survivors of the explosion began to place ads in newspapers around the country asking if anyone else remembered. This led to one reunion, and then to more. It wasn’t until roughly a half century after the explosion that the teahouse and museum opened.

The tragedy in New London was the first of its kind to become a worldwide, communal news event. Because new technology allowed for the same-day transmission of news photographs by wire, people around the world were riveted by the images of first responders lifting limp children from the rubble and the miles-long line of hearses carrying child-size caskets to back-to-back funerals. Schoolchildren in Brazil and Poland sent letters of sympathy.

In our day it has taken no time for Newtown’s tragedy to touch, and implicate, us all; it belongs to neighborhoods, cities and towns, and not just ours but other nations’. In this public sphere, where our shared grief, though well meaning, is anything but private, the rush for answers is more frantic and fraught, prompting immediate and galvanizing conversations about why we haven’t taken more steps to protect our children.

In the months before the 1937 explosion, state fire regulators tried to raise the alarm about the perils of natural gas, but it took the death of schoolchildren to impel politicians to act. Within days of the disaster, Texas legislators went into emergency session to promote the addition of a “malodorant” to natural gas, which has since saved countless lives.

Now, after Sandy Hook, there are renewed pushes for the regulation of semiautomatic weapons and provisions for providing better health care services for the mentally ill. The hardest work of grief belongs to the shattered families, but we have yet to determine what their loss will mean for America.

At the funerals for the children who died in Newtown, a nation wept as we heard how Jessica Rekos loved horseback riding and James Mattioli enjoyed singing at the top of his lungs. The details seem heartbreakingly ephemeral, soon swallowed by the maw of time.

Yet as you wander the exhibits at the London Museum today, what is most indelible are not the newspaper headlines or monumental shifts by politicians but rather the totems of individual, irreducible love: a boy’s pocketknife painted with red nail polish, a girl’s paper dolls clipped from the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog. They once belonged to children who, like the dead in Newtown and other billions who have graced this earth, still have no double.

*Sara Mosle writes the Schooling column for The Times, teaches at St. Philip’s Academy in Newark and is writing a book on the school explosion in New London, Tex.

Article appeared in on 12/30/2012