My Friend Asks How She Can Send Her Child to School Where She Might Be Shot

All you can do is not think about it.

Don't picture your child hearing loud bangs like the biggest door slamming. Don't imagine the confusion clouding his face, quickly replaced by the understanding that he's in danger. Don't share the panic he feels when he thinks he's forgotten the active shooter drills he practiced, those terrifying moments when adults pretend that someone has arrived to hurt them even though adults are supposed to keep them safe.

photo by Nicole Hester/The Tennessean via AP

Don't visualize his eyes getting wide with fear and his sweet face draining of color as his teacher gathers the children into a knot and tells them to go go go silently, quickly, to their safe space, wherever that is. Don't think of the black tip of a long gun bobbing as it's carried down the hall past the cafeteria with its small seats, past the trophy case full of pride, past your child's classroom door. 

Try not to imagine your child wetting her pants in shock and terror when the that door is split open, shattered by bullets that move faster than the speed of sound. Don't picture the way her petite body will jerk backwards and sideways when struck by bullets, like dancing to no music, dancing like she loves to do in the living room. Don't think about the way those brass projectiles liquefy her muscles, disintegrate her bones that you formed in your womb, explode her tender flesh that you just tickled last night. 

Don't envision her crumpled and bleeding into the rectangle of carpet printed with the block ABCs, the one she showed off at Meet the Teacher Night. Stop contemplating her extraordinary suffering as life, barely begun, exits her body. Don't know in your bones that her last thoughts are of you - you rushing in to hold her and brush her blonde hair from her face and tell her she's going to be okay. 

Don't visualize his black-haired best friend, the one who invited him to the trampoline park, crying fat tears over his destroyed body, waiting for the good guys to arrive, waiting for the horror to stop, waiting for his classmate to wake up. 

Don't anticipate getting texts and calls from the school asking you to wait for news of your children at the high school auditorium half a mile past the scene. Avoid seeing yourself as you speed 5 miles due west into a cacophony of wailing fire sirens and police sirens and ambulance sirens. Try not to imagine the way your stomach would churn and twist, how your heart would pound like it's trying to leave your chest and find your kids on its own. 

Don't picture relieved parents leaving one by one as they are reunited with their living children while you sit still. Don't imagine the thinning crowd of families - 50 then 10 then 5 left, and you. Don't feel reality squeeze your heart until it bursts, and you scream until everything goes black. 

Whatever you do, do not think about having to walk stiffly into a cold morgue lit bright as the sun. Do not consider what it is like to identify your child only by the poorly tied loops of his lime green shoelaces, or the particular pattern of dirt stains made on her socks by the straps of her black Mary Janes. Do not consider that there is nothing else left that is identifiable except your aching love.

Do not allow yourself to imagine the break that keeps on breaking but is never broken, because if you do, you'll never let them go again.