“I Want to Share the Pain.” Help Me Figure Out Why

Interesting question.

I guess we’re all sisters on some level. And that’s a good thing. Turning away from a sister’s pain would tend to distance us in general, I think.

Of course I don’t mean to exclude men. I guarantee that there were many millions of tears shed by men last Friday too.

Denying our emotions denies our humanity. Sharing the burden of grief, no matter the distance or “good it does”, helps us to remember that we’re all in this together.

Sharing the burden of grief is part of the Christian faith, and, I would guess, other faiths as well. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” Romans 12:15.

After a tragedy like this everyone asks how we can prevent this from happening again..the scary truth is, we can’t, for the most part, without living in a completely locked down society, and even that won’t guarantee any safety… Problem is, no one in the public realm will admit this. We have always had to rely on our fellow human beings doing the right thing in the past. There are just fewer and fewer people with a strong moral compass, or too many mentally ill people, drugged out and disconnected from reality by psychotropics that these instances are on the rise. We have always had the guns, we have just had more people with stronger sense of right vs. wrong.
On any given day, we have to hope and trust that the car coming head on at you does not cross the double yellow line, whether due to negligent behavior, accident or malicious intent…, that the bus driver doesn’t flip out and drive the bus off a cliff. That the pilot flying your plane isn’t suicidal that day…and so on… These occasions, while rare, make us fully aware of our powerless, of our lack of control. The first knee jerk reaction is to reach for more control, i.e. legislation. But if anyone was really honest they would realize that more laws don’t put us more in control. They just make us feel that way.

Bob, I think it’s right to recognize the difference between this kind of shocking, sudden thing that happens in an unimaginable way, and for unimaginable reasons, and the kind of thing that happens because, well, life is really hard and awful for a lot of folks, always has been, and always will be.

I don’t mean in any way to diminish those deaths from war, starvation, disease, etc. It’s just that you can see that kind of thing coming. It’s not any less horrible, but shock and suddenness are aggravating factors in how we react to it, and I think that’s normal, not wrong. When my 85ish year old parents died of cancer and Parkinson’s, that was awful. Yet it was a completely different thing from when my 51-year-old friend died from bee-sting anaphylaxis one sunny Saturday.

We want to feel the pain because we want to have empathy. If we don’t feel pain from something like this, we think, there must be something wrong with us, some kind of psychopathic tendency.

This is especially immediate in the wake of a shooting like this, since the act of shooting a bunch of innocents is (often) the work of a psychopath. Nobody wants to be like the shooter in any way, even the most superficial.

Simple human compassion. Some of us feel it more strongly than others, but it’s there. We’re wired that way, and that’s a good thing.

“Shared pain is lessened.
Shared joy is increased.
Thus we refute entropy.”
–Spider Robinson

Bob, I dunno, but I feel grief/sympathy when I learn of any parent losing a child. If anything, it’s worse if your child’s death is a sort of “isolated incident,” because that in a way makes the grieving parents isolated.

I also feel there’s a loss of innocence for our children when something like this happens. Not that I’m telling my young kids (age 5 & 6) about this, but in my own mind, that they could be the targets of some maniac kind of changes the picture of childhood a little bit.

Yesterday my kids had their church Christmas program and there was a weird-looking young guy (looking confused, never seen him before, greasy hair, lots of tats, hands in his coat pockets – it wasn’t cold in there) who walked up and down the side aisles a couple of times before he finally left. All I could think of was “copycat” and “I hope some folks in this congregation are packin’.” Call me crazy, I don’t care. Would I have thought that way a week ago? Not sure.

By the way, remember that time in Russia (or neighboring country) when the school was taken over by gunmen during the 1st day ceremonies? There were many adults and children killed. I felt the same way about that, even though that was a politically motivated act on the other side of the world that didn’t endanger my kids at all. The thought that some people could make and carry out a plan to murder children should upset all sane humans. The realization that each of those kids has grieving parents should grieve all sane humans.

That’s not to say the media circus doesn’t disgust me. I’m not even looking at the news as much as usual these days. Just give me the facts whenever you have them straight. Why do I want to know what Geraldo or 100 other reporters or even Obama thinks of this? Is it really news that people have a heart? I hope not.

Maybe I’m just in a bad mood, but sometimes I think people wallow in all this to stroke their own egos. I must be a wonderful, empathetic, overall good person because I am capable of feeling pain for someone half a world away on the basis of a bunch of news reports. If this sort of event doesn’t move me to tears I must be a bad person, so I’m going to get worked up about it just to prove how good a person I am.

Bingo. We all heard the news and we all hurt to think of how it must have been and how it must be. But then the public emoting began. I stopped reading the Facebook postings when I read one that talked about how she “said No a little less often over the weekend” to her kids. I mean, c’mon! If your reaction to Sandy Hook is like that, fine. We all react in some way. Some of us hug our kids, some of us make sure the safety is on and the ammo is put away. But we don’t all have to announce how sad we are or how we just can’t imagine.

That’s the bit that makes me crazy: Individuals who are not connected to Sandy Hook in any way (except to recognize and react to the pain) going public with their breast-beating. It’s so easy to go public now.

Lenore, I agree. Yes, the Sandy Hook shooting was tragic, the Columbine shooting was tragic, 9/11 was tragic, the Montreal Massacre was tragic, and the child abductions that are all over the news are also tragic. However, it’s possible to feel for the people affected, but still go on living their lives. When I was living in Australia, in the International House community, there was a boy from another residence who went surfing one morning, and drowned in the ocean. The friends he was with couldn’t save him, and the lifeguard didn’t get there fast enough, or maybe it was early in the morning, before the lifeguards arrived. I don’t remember exactly, but a lot of my friends knew him, and of course they were sad, but nobody went into hysterics. I’m fairly good at art, so I made a poster-sized card on behalf of iHouse, people signed it, and we gave it to the director of Campus East, where the boy had lived, and they probably displayed it somewhere, so that the residents there would know we were thinking of them. Meanwhile, people continued going to classes, evening activities, and yes, even to the beach. I remember that day pretty well, because I remember going jogging along the path by the beach that morning, and seeing the waves, and debating going back home for my body board–for the uninitiated, the line between “fun waves” and “dangerous waves” can be pretty thin sometimes. I’m glad I didn’t attempt to surf that day, but I’m also glad that nobody stopped surfing permanently (or tried to stop anyone else from surfing) because of one freak accident.

” My church is having a special prayer service for the victims and I gotta say — Why? I mean, why not have special services for the kids killed by random violence and war all over the world every day? A whole village can be massacred in Africa or some other third world location and we don’t care, but 20 American kids die and it’s a worldwide crisis?”

ITA – Our Pastor stated in his Sermon yesterday. While we are outraged by the murders of these 20 beautiful children – where is the outrage of the 50 children that die every min from starvation and illnesses that we have cures for.

Yet I don’t think I have ever wept like this for kids I don’t know and a town I have never been to. It is private in my home. I am catching myself to stop in front of my kids. I won’t turn on the TV – I do read the Washington Post and read on the Internet. I picture those kids laying in the classroom or I see a picture of the deceased child, teacher, psychologist, and principal and I just get so choked up. Probably because I have a 2nd grader that is a toehead with blue eyes. I see my child and then my imagination runs wild.

I still took my child to school today w/o concern. In reality I have trained myself to accept inherent risks to every situation. I know my kids are safe at school. It is the safest place for them to be. My daughters MS has a police officer that hangs out in the lobby most of the time. I always see him when I go to the school to volunteer. Now I really appreciate him being there. It is too bad the Elementary school did not have an armed officer in the building. He would have been met at the door with bullets and would not have made it past the lobby. Now I think our county is putting an officer in every elementary school just like the HS and MS.

A child who looses their parents is an orphan. A wife who looses her husband is a widow. A husband who looses their wife is a widower.

There is no word in the English language to describe the depths of pain a parent feels when they loose their child.

I read on another blog yesterday these wise words:

“We are all indescribably sad. We send a prayer to those families who are going through this tragedy even more than we are. But we will give them the respect of letting the depth of their grief be theirs… we will not claim it for ourselves.”

I do not understand why so many people want to insert themselves into tragedies and to take on the grief of others as their own. I wonder if it is because we don’t know how else to express ourselves, when something really awful happens. (I also wonder if some people simply like the attention.)

I grew up nearby to Newtown and have been reeling a bit, these last few days, with the shock of something happening in a place I know and love so well. A few people here who know where I am from have offered their sympathy and condolences, and I haven’t known quite how to respond. It makes me uncomfortable. Those near and dear to me in town are fine (physically; emotionally is another story entirely, of course), and I know the sadness I feel is just a pinprick compared to what those who are actually grieving a child, a neighbor, a friend, a schoolmate are feeling. I can’t lessen their suffering by taking on their grief as my own.

I get a sort of mental dissonance from knowing something awful happened, but not seeing it. It feels detached and on some level wrong to just peacefully read or hear about something horrendous. Something that for the people experiencing it is a visceral experience. I guess I was raised with enough TV that I expect a visceral story to feel visceral. To not get that sensation, feels sort of sick, or at least it used to.

I haven’t been watching any of this. The shock of hearing the press conference on multiple stations in my car, and thinking it might have happened in my city, gave me a good dose more of the visceral than I could stand.

I think my desire to have a visceral feeling of horror for horrifying events have been subsiding along with my TV viewing. At this point TV has been practically eliminated, from my home. Now that I’m accustomed to the more muted intellectual approach to news of all kinds, it feels ever more grotesque to insert myself into someone else’s horror and pain, via the camera. Particularly those camera’s shoved into a grief stricken, or a panic stricken parent’s face. That seems so vulgar now.

Somewhere in the back our minds we know that children by the thousands die everyday and when I think of that it does make me horribly sad, but I can push it away with other thoughts and get through my life without too much empathy bringing me down. This is different in many ways though, these are children who we did not consider at risk, there was no war, no sickness, no natural disaster these babies were taken in a brutal fashion by a sick individual who if provided the help that he needed might not have done this and for that we grieve and it is trust into our conscience constantly by every news organization out there, there is no escape. I also think that somewhere in back of our minds we hope that those people will be comforted in some small way know that the world cries with them.

I’m just stricken by how inexplicable this is.

The best viewpoint I’ve run across is simply that it is part of a large and unimaginable plan of God. I simply cannot fathom it.

Having said all that, I also agree that there’s sort of a “porn” mentality to some of this — that’s meant as an analogy, not that I think what’s going on is literally sexually charged. People get some kind of satisfaction from thinking how much they care. I think a more obvious case than this one for that was the death of Princess Diana. A woman with a troubled personal life dies in a car accident — that’s about what it added up to, in the barest of terms. Yet people all over the world were convincing themselves that they were personally bereft.

This case has somewhat more foundation — we feel legitimate shock and horror when kids like ours have unspeakably horrible things happen to them. (And though it’s true that a person of unlimited emotional capacity and generosity might be able to react the same way to kids who are significantly different suffering the same way, I don’t think we’re MEANT to be that way. That we react more strongly to things that feel closer to us in a whole variety of ways is what keeps us able to function in a world full of awful stuff. As long as we don’t actually convince ourselves that the kids who don’t look like ours don’t matter, I don’t think there’s a problem.) But it so easily slides over into a means of self-aggrandizement — we’re good people because we lose sleep over things a thousand miles away that happen to people we don’t know.

But on the third hand, as others have pointed out, people are just different. My sister-in-law spends a day crying every time one of these mass horrors happens, especially to children. I don’t think she’s a sop and I don’t think she derives emotional or mental satisfaction from thinking she’s a good person for caring. I truly believe she is the most tender-hearted person I’ve ever known.

I don’t get why people want to know so much about the individual victims in this tragedy. To me, watching these people grieve is the same as gawking at the victims of a car accident on the side of the road. I have specifically avoided all news coverage of the victims because I believe they have a right to privacy. If it was my own child who had died like that I wouldn’t want his name and photo released to the world. I would want to grieve in private with my family.

All us parents just got an email from the principal of my younger son’s school (edited slightly):

“I am sure many of you are wondering about your children today. I am happy to report that today has been a typical Monday–students kicked off their morning with a fabulous jazz performance. I have been in and out of all classrooms today and have enjoyed hearing stories about students’ pending vacations, all about me presentations, and reports on their reading. Indoor recess was an energetic and fun time (as always–chock full of disappointed kids who ask if they could PLEASE go outside??!!?) Teachers have been working hard to maintain our normal routine, and it shows! While I will send another update later this evening with details about the day and our safety protocols for your review, I wanted to let you know how we are doing. Thank you for all of your well wishes and for your support.”

This is about the 6th email from the school district since the shooting. I don’t know, it seems like they’re somehow shocked that the kids aren’t prostrated by this. I don’t need an update every five minutes saying “The kids are still fine!” I know they are.

Sorry, I won’t be going to any candlelight vigils tonight (yes, one is planned in my town). If I had any free time, I would spend it lobbying for better gun control laws, better mental health services, or something that would actually do more good than all this pointless hand wringing by people who weren’t even there.

M in AL: I thought I was the only one in the world who didn’t get the point of flowers, toys and teddy bears at the sites of tragedies.

I suppose toys and teddy bears are at least understandable in the case of children, but it seems particularly incongruous and almost laughable in other circumstances: On the patrol car of a macho cop killed in the line of duty, for example. In these cases I think these tributes trivialize and almost ridicule an adult’s accomplishments and death.

I don’t think sympathy is a bad thing. I *do* grieve with parents who have lost their children, whether to cancer, to an accident or to a shooting. Actual tears. It really isn’t something I choose, but I know what I would feel if it had happened to my kids and my heart cries for the parents.

However, I will also say that constant media attention does not help anyone. My brother’s 13-year-old niece was shot and killed in a mass murder in 1999. As he told me this weekend, “Grieving that kind of loss is excruciating. Having to do it in the public eye is worse.” And as my sister-in-law said on the anniversary of the shooting when another memorial and dedication was scheduled, “I’m so tired of talking about she died. Can we, for once, talk about how she lived?”

Granted, it’s a bit early to say that about Newtown. But at some point, it can become too much for the survivors. We don’t want to pretend it never happened, but all of those families were more than just victims and we do them an injustice to reduce them to that.

Huh. The quote didn’t come through. I’ll retype it:

“We don’t want to pretend it never happened, but all of those families were more than just victims and we do them an injustice to reduce them to that.”

Sorry to go off-topic, but does anyone know where I can find a Houston area lawyer who supports Free Range? I just got a cop write me up and tell me she’s going to call CPS for letting my 6yo play at the park right down the street from our house.

Because we know that the pain of those involved must be terrible to the point of being impossible to understand, yet we wish to understand our fellow human beings.

“If the connection is our humanity, then all we should grieve for all children everywhere regardless of race, ethnicity or culture. But we don’t. If we are really all in this together, why are we selective about who we grieve for?”

I love Bob’s question. I guess it all has to do with what triggers us. Different people have different triggers. When my husband mentioned this event to me, it triggered dismay, sadness and frustration, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel my heart break. Maybe that’s because I’ve accepted, somewhat wearily, the fact that in a country where guns are easy to attain, there will be random acts of violence involving guns. It’s not really a surprise.

I don’t have a TV, so maybe if I saw all the children’s faces, or corpses, or saw interviews with grieving parents, it would be different for me. Different triggers elicit different responses.

We are hard-wired as humans to have a sympathetic emotional response to suffering. I’m REALLY wired that way. That’s why I cannot watch those “funniest home videos” showing people suffering horrible pain, or even disappointment. It’s simply awful for me. I can’t even enjoy Chevy Chase “Vacation” movies because they trigger depression instead of levity, seeing everything go so terribly wrong for the characters. There’s enough for me to respond to, right here in front of me, every day of my life. I don’t need the thrill of artificially triggering my emotional responses. And don’t even think about horror movies. I’m over it. Completely.

I, too, got the predictable emails from the school today, giving me the details of the “lockdown” policy, NOT THAT THERE IS ANY IMMINENT THREAT TODAY, oh no, of course not, your kids are alright. I count myself absolute last on the list of parents who would contact the school and query about what they plan to “do about it” in the wake of this “incident in Connecticut.” Do about it? Nothing. There’s nothing we can do about it, especially here in Canada. We’ve already done plenty with our firearms laws; it’s so vanishingly unlikely that someone would come in to shoot up the school already, what’s to do? Crikey, I get the heebie-jeebies thinking that some parents actually CALLED THE SCHOOL and wanted to make sure *their kids* are safe. No, parents, your kids are not any more, or less, safe than they were yesterday. Now find a spiritual practice and get yourself some grounding and acceptance around life’s unpredictability.

Cranky today.

I feel like a bitch for saying this, but here goes. I think we “share” our pain the way the stimulious is presented to us in the first place. What an apt term, share is too: through social media humanity has been reduced to what amounts to marketing. So we share openly and publicly with the lack of conviction the news came to us. We’re so bombarded with images and pointless updates that restate information with high repetition. Before there’s time for any thoughtful discussion or response we become disinterested. So as a society we re-post tributes on Facebook and dutifully update our statuses to show we care or at least are informed but very little real discussion will occur.
These families, this community will grieve forever but the rest of us will be over it next week. Not because we’re terrible people, but because we never felt anything real to begin with.

@Lollipoplover–Good lord, did you read the last paragraph of that article? That high school does routine lockdown drills–complete with actors to simulate a threat. I’m pretty sure I’d pull my kid out of there!

@Julie, not only that, the vast majority of commenters were in favor of the lockdown over an umbrella – one even cliched “better safe than sorry.” It was an UMBRELLA. Who would have been sorry again? And why were the boys still being interviewed by detectives at the time the article was lifted? I’m so sad that our culture has come to this.

There are several elements at work:
1- the selfish element which is the desire to be “linked” somehow to a national tragedy, even when it has nothing to do with you. it may be the tears you shed with friend or the would-be premonitions you have (nightmare friday morning?). Mine was the song “Seven Spanish Angels” in my ears upon waking.
2-the desire for community in an increasingly insular world. paradoxically, as we see more news from the other side of the globe, we do not know who our neighbors are. we have few raw intimate connections in our general life and increasingly find difficulty having those connections with those we say we love.
3-we are in some way innocculating ourselves from the possibility of outliving our children. The less the likelihood that a child will die in a sudden, violent, unexpected manner, the more likely the parent can take the emotional liberty to feel the pain. but we feel this pain the same way we feel gravity by bungi jumping. no matter how terrifying it is to fall, before you begin your decent, you know you will rebound. and you know you will walk away from it.

I would be curious to ask any number of parents from neighborhoods where the likelihood that they will outlive their child is realitively high, do they have these grief fantasies as well, or is their respone to further insulate themselves from their dangerous reality?

The kids ages 4 and 5 were both wiped and were out cold by 745! My wife Lisa was out cold by 800!

Dinner dishes are in the dishwasher and I’m sitting here in the living room with just the light from our Christmas tree. Thinking. Reflecting. And crying.

The tragedy in Connecticut on Friday has truly affected me. Those who know me well know I have never been a “what if” thinker. I have never worried about what might happen. I take the facts, situation, decisions, and everything else and I just run with it. I don’t worry. “It is what it is,” is a common phrase.

Then why, after 43 years of life, am I sitting here wondering and getting worked up over the questions running through my head? What if it were Melody’s or Sam’s school? What if something happened to one of them? What if I were traveling for work when it happened? How quick could I get home. Doesn’t matter, it would not be quick enough. How would Lisa handle it? How would I console her? Or Sam? Or Melody? Would/Could either child understand and comprehend if something happened to the other?

And as much as this thinking has caused me to actually start crying, I tell myself that this is all hypothetical thinking to ME. But for nearly 30 families, this is their reality. This is their real life nightmare.

I have prayed. Not for the 20 children as I believe that all 20 of them are in heaven, with God and Jesus. No, I have prayed for the families of those 20 children and 8 adults that were killed. I pray for the other children in that school that were injured. I pray for the all of the other children that were in that school that day because their lives will never be the same. While they may have been on the other side of the building and never even saw the shooter, their lives have changed and they have lost a part of their childhood which they will, unfortunately, never get back.

After watching the news on Friday, one of the people standing next to me said, “Oh, those poor parents.” I replied, “And there nothing we can do to help them. Nothing to make them feel better.”

I still believe that. Anything we say, post to Facebook, or tell one another will not make those parents feel any better. Nothing we send them will help. It is not like a hurricane came through and destroyed their house and they need food, or shelter, or clothes. It is not as though we can hold a concert to raise money to help them rebuild their lives. Nothing we can do or say will help these parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends, classmates, or teachers. Their lives have been shattered and there is nothing we can do to help. Anything we say or post is only to make ourselves feel better.

Posting on Facebook pictures of these children and adults killed do not help the families. The help the person posting. Period. I saw a picture posted of a mother, father, and 3 children who looked to be around 3, 4, and 5 years old. The started to read the status that went with the picture and it said that the 5 year old girl on the far right was one of the kindergarteners who was killed. And I started to cry and I closed down Facebook. Does posting that picture help the parents or the family in anyway? Absolutely not.

Where am I going with this? I have no idea. On Friday, I couldn’t put together a coherent thought and just had to post a list of words. Three days later, I can fill a couple of pages, but it is as if I have ADD. I can come up with a lot of disjointed thoughts. Hopefully, in a couple more days, I can put it all together so it makes more sense.

Until then, I will continue to pray for these families. I hope you do the same.

This is a really interesting question, something I’ve thought about too.
I’ve decided that, for me….

I don’t need to watch interviews with 7 year olds to know that they will need a lot of time to heal.

I don’t need to see the pictures and read the names of the children and adults who were murdered, to know that their families will miss them forever.

I don’t need to know what happened at the funerals to know that this is one of the hardest days of theses parents lives.

I don’t need to know about the perpetrators mother and brother and father to know that only a person who is deeply disturbed would commit such an act.

I don’t need to talk to my friends about how devastated I am because although I feel sad, my life will be the same as it was before, in just a matter of days. The lives of those who were actually there, and who lost loved ones, will never be the same. My wallowing will not do anything for them.

I wish the media would leave that community alone. Let them mourn without cameras.

@Bob: Because, Bob, we could not mentally endure sharing the pain of every tragedy. It would break any one of us. But to hear about this is to feel pain, whether we call it sharing or not.

When we yearn to take the burden of pain from someone, that is called prayer. It strengthens the families. So we are sharing the pain in a way. However, if nobody knows, then they don’t know to pray.

The gross exploitation by the media is another issue. I haven’t seen Tv coverage, just read the basics when it first happened,nbut I’m sure there are hundreds of private moments made public every day.

What Fernando said! So well-thought out and well-said. I also understand Erik’s point of view, and I think he makes Fernando’s point. My husband is a 1st grade teacher, and this weekend was long and emotional as we tried to avoid the news (nearly impossible) and he tried to not think of his own 26 students. He is not an emotional man, so this was unusual. I am glad that he is, though, level-headed and has already gotten past the worst of his feelings. I hope we all do because, as has been pointed out already, our sympathic grief will not help the people suffering with the very real grief of losing innocence, children, and mothers and teachers.

I have fortunately not followed any of the coverage b/c by chance I haven’t been near a TV or radio much lately. I’ve heard bits about it.

I see no point in going out my way to learn the details about it. There are hundreds of tragic things going on in the world and even in my city. For example, people of all ages get rare autoimmune diseases that leave them completely disabled and eventually dead. My area of knowledge is not related to helping rare diseases, so I choose not to think about them unless they hit someone I know.

OTOH, if someone I know experiences a tragedy, I want to help. If these kids were harmed by a freak electrical accident, I would be interested b/c I’m an electrical engineer and might possibly be able take some action on my projects to protect against a similar accident.

People in distance cities who don’t know anyone connected to this recent tragedy but feel the need to share or do something are IMHO suffering b/c they’re hearing news they can’t do anything about. _Maybe_ they could use the information to shape their views on public health, policing, or gun control, but most people know freak tragic crimes happen from time to time, so the particulars of this crime won’t change their views on these issues.

IMHO it’s normal foible to crane your neck to see a car wreck. It’s not health to spend more than a few seconds staring at a tragedy. People who read long articles about it, watch long news stores, and listen to commentators argue what it means for political issues are IMHO engaging in unhealthy behavior.

I don’t know these people. I may sound callous. But really, I don’t know them, their kids, their lives. And I don’t think that I can afford to. I don’t want to. I don’t need borrowed grief.

I knew a beautiful sweet little girl. She died of cancer, after a long struggle. I had some very frank conversations with the mother before her daughter died. I didn’t know what to say, but I was willing to be an ear, which she sorely needed.

I have a friend with two adopted boys. One of them clearly has mental issues (at age 8 or so) and little brother is scared of him, and the parents are scared of what he might do to little brother. He pulled out his front bottom teeth (adult) when his little brother lost a baby tooth. They can’t get the help they need for this troubled boy that they love.

I have friend with a daughter with a very painful condition. The other night she was in great pain, and reported to her mother the next morning that she can’t wait until she dies, because, she said to her mother, “there is no pain in Heaven.” Her condition is not considered deadly, but instead is to be a life of pain. I am scared for this little girl, the little girl who held my son’s hand when he was in 2nd grade and she was in first and they declared that when they finished college they would get married.

I don’t want to dwell on what happened last Friday. I had a great day with my kids, then found about the shooting. I worry about my friends. Some with mundane issues, some with more extreme. I am not sure how much energy I can extend to people I don’t know when people near me are suffering so much…and I know them and their pain and I still don’t know how to deal with it.

So I turn off the TV and radio and save my tears for my friends and their children whom I know.

There was a school shooting at my high school several years ago. My family knew the shooter and the victims very well.

Mom posted on her FB feed that after that incident, the kids (young adults, teenagers) were ready to move on. “We already know how awful it is. We were there. It was our friends who were killed, and our friend who was the killer. It’s the grown ups who want to drag this out.”

I hate to sound callous, but beyond being sad for the families of the victims (including the killer), and hoping that they find comfort someday, I really don’t want to hear it. I’ve just about shut down my FB, won’t watch TV, and I’m actively avoiding it.

I enjoyed the ballet I was watching with my kids (we went to see the Nutcracker), and had a lovely lunch with them, went home, did schoolwork with them, and then sent them out to play. When they asked me about the news, I reminded them that the reason it’s on the news is that it isn’t common, and that they just don’t need to worry about it.

That’s all they wanted to know. And that’s all I wanted to cope with.

I don’t want to share the pain, I actually have enough of my own to deal with.

I’ve skimmed the above comments, and I don’t have anything more to add. I agree that the media circus is disgusting. In fact, my first fb post was to lambast the media for their behavior, and I think that more of my friends “liked” that single post than anything else I’ve posted. (Clearly I do not post things that are of great interest to anyone but myself and my immediate circle of friends, haha!)

But I was/am still riled up about it. It is a tragedy that children were killed. It is a travesty that it’s being reduced to a referendum on gun control. And it’s appalling that today, as my father-in-law was watching TV, I could not escape continuing coverage, telling me the life stories of the kids, giving me an update on various mental health conditions, advising me that if my child is mentally ill then I should not take them to a shooting range, and (my anger really flared at this one) Dr. Oz dedicating an entire episode to how I should explain this to my child. My child is three and lives in Iowa. Why in the hell should he even know about this? So I sent an email to several of the large media outlets in which I told them exactly what I thought of them and their behavior concerning tragedies like these. I don’t expect to hear a response back, but I felt like I needed to speak up. I’m disgusted by the way the media behaves and the borderline hysterical reactions that the audience has to it.

I think it’s natural and good to feel sadness in response to tragedy and empathy for those affected. I totally understand not wanting to ignore the bad things that happen in the world.

On the other hand, though I know it’s done with good intentions I can’t help but feel that it’s vulgar, inconsiderate and selfish to pretend that we are somehow grieving alongside the victims rather than simply empathising with them. I’m making the distinction that way because I’m not sure how else to make it – it’s not that we don’t grieve life that’s taken too soon, but I feel like a lot of people are trying to feel it on equal footing with those closest to the victims, to immerse themselves in the same sadness the families are feeling. It hits home that these kids are not different than the children in our lives. That school was like our school. It hits home that this is the sort of thing that could happen to us, however unlikely it may be. That’s true, and it’s very, very sad, but it’s not about us, and trying to elevate our grief to something closer to what the families are feeling in response to the fear that evokes is inappropriate.

As much as I’m sure the families of the victims appreciate the shared sadness and empathy, they also deserve the privacy necessary to grieve and to pick up the pieces as much as they can. If we feel that close to the situation then we need to pull ourselves together take a step back out of respect. It’s a fine line and like I said, I know that it’s not crossed out of cruelty. But I wish we’d find the emotional maturity to cross it less often out of kindness.

It seems to me that part of what we are grieving is that we no longer feel as safe. Of course it is impossible not to feel horrible for everyone involved and it is equally impossible not to imagine yourself in that situation. Most of us understand that we are more likely to get killed in a car accident than at school or in a mall, the difference is that we previously felt safe at school or in a mall. Now that feeling of safety is taken away. So while I didn’t personally lose anyone at Sandy Hook, I lost some of the security I felt on sending my kids to school.

I have to theories – bear with me.

1. I think that many Western countries have been so good at creating a general sense of stability (there are no wars, most people can meeet their basic needs, etc.), that there is a sense of life being a bit too level, perhaps boring? People look for things to push their emotions, scary movies (they get scarier all the time) and following the media circus of scary events.

2. I think that there is a general sense in our brains of things that are a)safe, b)a bit safe, a bit dangerous, c)dangerous. People stereotype in order to categorise information in our heads, otherwise it’s too much. We categorise from experience, we think ok: war=dangerous; driving=safe/dangerous; elementary school=safe. But, now many are struggling to figure out, really, does this mean that now elementary school=safe/dangerous? and moving things categories is hard and scary, it shakes the order of the world in our heads.

I’m glad to see that quite a few people feel similarly to my wife and I. While it’s horrific for the people impacted, this kind of thing is an emotion rollercoaster that we don’t ride.

We chatted by IM while it was happening, and I’ve had conversations about mental health and gun control with various people and we watched the President’s speech with our 15 year old and and spoke in general terms with our 15 year-old about it over the weekend, and his school’s lock-down procedures, etc. But didn’t really think about it when he came home Friday afternoon or when I dropped him off at school Monday.

But we don’t dwell on things as some people seem to. I wonder if part of the reason is that we don’t watch TV news at all?

“Why DO we want to share the pain? And how is this actually sharing?”

It isn’t sharing, it’s exploiting.

It’s following the old news adage, “If it bleeds, it leads”.

What’s new is the voracious 24/7 news cycle, and the global battle for viewers. What used to be a local incident, turning up a few days later on an inner page of another newspaper turns into a national news item within moments, and if it’s bloody enough, an international one.

It may sound callous, but I haven’t given this situation a thought since the day it happened. Even that day, I thought “what a horrible thing to happen” and our office discussed how difficult it would be for us personally to represent someone who did something like that. That was it. No tears. No anguish.

While I feel for anyone who loses a loved one, I don’t know these people and I’m not going to act as though I do. This is not my grief to share and I think it takes something away from them if I insert myself into their grief. Nor does my sharing have any meaning to the families. They don’t grieve any less because some person on some island they’ve likely never heard of grieves with them. It does nothing except make my life less enjoyable.

Love the comment about sentimentality. Yes!

It isn’t just the flavour of the month when it comes to newsworthy tragedies either. It permeates in a whole range of different areas of our culture. And personally I am quite severely allergic to it.

So as a parent who has lost a young child suddenly, I can tell you that I can remember how I felt about these tragedies before…and how I feel now.

If you’ve never lived through something like this, I think there really IS a certain amount of “making it about me” to this, but probably not in the negative way that sounds. As humans, we need to gauge our own strength, sometimes. There is a tiny voice in the back of your head that says, “Could I survive that? Would I react with grace, or would I fold?” This is part of our survival instinct at some level. We need to be reassured that we would still be able to function if that happened to us. And we are terrified that we won’t, so we test that by trying to live vicariously, as though it will somehow make us immune later.

Once you HAVE survived a tragedy like this (and I’m not saying that I’ve experienced ANYthing like what the hell those poor people are going through), you have a different perspective. You look at the tragedy and say “I feel so sorry for you; I know what you are facing this Christmas, and every one for the rest of your life.” You silently welcome them into “the club nobody wants to belong to.” The details of the tragedy don’t matter very much, because in the end, it doesn’t change anything for those families. Or for you.

But you don’t wonder if you can survive it anymore. You know you can. So sharing the pain becomes less important.

Just one woman’s perspective.