A number of months ago, I received a picture from our dear family friend who was having our kids over for dinner. We have a childcare gap more often than I would like. It is usually when I am working at the synagogue and my wife can’t quite leave her patients. So we have these neighbors, wonderful, kind and giving friends, who will feed our children, pick flowers and mushrooms with them and regale them with stories of adventure and times long ago until Stephanie can get home to gather them up for their bedtime routines.
In the picture he sent me our older son is missing several teeth. When at the dentist last, Dr. Charlie told us, “Elijah is going to loose 10 teeth this year!” I wondered aloud - “how is that possible? Does he even have that many teeth to loose?” Our wonderful dentist assured me that yes and it would be fine. “It’s a dental rite of passage the hole-filled mouth how all kids this age look, it is the 3rd-5th great tooth escape.” I laughed and made a dumb rabbi joke “a holy mouth”. I told Elijah I don’t believe Dr. Charlie but less than 24 hours letter he showed me his very loose tooth. And 3 teeth followed then 3 more totaling 6 visits from the tooth fairy in four months. And so his smile is goofy and adorable with lots of spaces of emptiness waiting for his grow up teeth to arrive waiting for him to grow up.
Today is the anniversary of the murder of 26 people, 20 children mostly first graders, the age of our youngest, gunned down in their classrooms. FIRST GRADE. I can’t stop looking at this picture of Elijah from a couple months ago and now their pictures frozen in time. I see his silly looking grin with all the holes waiting for the adult teeth to arrive. I can’t stop thinking about the bodies of those babies, those tiny children ages just like my own, who have holes in their mouth where adult teeth will never come in, gangly arms and legs that will never get the muscles and height needed to control those limbs. Those are children who will never grow to reach high school, to find a partner, to choose a career, to make dumb choices as adolescents or slam doors and roll their eyes at their parents. And those parents,רחמנא לצלן, continue to wake up every day to the nightmare of the grief of a dead child.
When the shooting in Uvalde happened a few months ago and children were murdered at school AGAIN. In advance of school that day, knowing our older two children, would likely hear from friends about the shooting, we had a brief conversation with them explaining what had happened. Stick to the facts, developmental experts tell us. Less is more they say. Answer what they ask and nothing more. So we did. Short explanation. And then I said do you have any questions for me. And one of our kids paused, took and breath and said, “I don’t understand. Not the guns but the school why would someone possibly choose to do this at a school where there kids like me?” And I was stunned into silence. I had no answer. No good rationale or reason. I had no way to respond to her. No way to express my grief that it wasn’t the shooting that shocked her that was somehow understandable. No way to explain how someone does such a thing. No way to explain how we citizens have allowed this scourge to go on and on killing children in Connecticut, Florida, Texas and on and on and Black people in Buffalo and Charleston and Jews in Pittsburgh and on and on.
I consider myself a master of the answers at this point 10 years in and my game is strong - drugs check. Where do babies come from and sex questions check. Religion and God check. Money check. Gender check. And the list goes on but there are times when our grief engulfs us and our rational answers slip away and our pain and helplessness is right there at the surface. There are times when we the parents are simply like the children with gaping holes not in our mouths but in our hearts. And rage in our souls.
הָ֭רֹפֵא לִשְׁב֣וּרֵי לֵ֑ב וּ֝מְחַבֵּ֗שׁ לְעַצְּבוֹתָֽם׃מוֹנֶ֣ה מִ֭סְפָּר לַכּוֹכָבִ֑ים לְ֝כֻלָּ֗ם שֵׁמ֥וֹת יִקְרָֽא׃
God is the healer of the broken-hearted and binds their wounds. God counts the stars to all of them God calls them by name. May it be so.
So let us not forget these tiny people and their teachers had names, let us call them by name:
Rachel D'Avino, 29, behavior therapist
Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal
Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher
Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist
Victoria Leigh Soto, 27, teacher
Students:
Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
Ana Márquez-Greene, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison Wyatt, 6