“He touched me with His right hand and said, ‘Do not be afraid, I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever.'”
John, Revelations.
And so, three months after the killings, Newtown rises to life after death at Easter.
“I knew the moment I arrived at the firehouse on the morning of Dec. 14 that Catherine was in heaven,” says Jen Hubbard, of her 6-year-old daughter. “I knew my son Freddie was still here, but Catherine was with God.”
Catherine Hubbard was one of 20 children and six adults murdered in the Sandy Hook grade school by a rampaging monster firing 154 shots from an AR-15 Bushmaster assault rifle.
“Before anyone told me anything official I just knew as a mother,” says Jen Hubbard, reflecting on her murdered child on Holy Thursday morning. She had just rushed into St. Rose’s Learning Center after collecting clothes for the parents of a boy who’d survived the shootings only for the family home to burn down last Wednesday night.
Hubbard seemed more concerned about that family’s plight than her own gigantic loss.
“I’m at complete peace,” she says. “Just as I was at total peace on Dec. 14 at the firehouse because I knew Catherine was with God. A lot of people have said, ‘Oh, Jen’s just avoiding it, in denial.’ But I know full well what happened in that school. Horrific, what happened. I choose not to dwell on that. Because to do that allows the Devil to win. God didn’t do this. The Devil did and he thought we would crumble. But the Devil was wrong. It has made us stronger physically and spiritually — as people, as families, as a town. I wouldn’t live anywhere else but Newtown, which 100 days after the shooting is filled with hope and light.”
I found evidence of that everywhere I went in Newtown on Holy Thursday, driving around with a local family man named Dennis Stratford who works as a courier for the Newtown school district and whose own son, Luke 6, was in the Sandy Hook school that morning.
“The morning of the shootings I got a call from a co-worker, a plumber, and he said something had happened at the school,” says Stratford. “Maybe a domestic incident. No one was sure. I had an instant feeling it was very bad. I get signs from God like that. I jumped in my school van and raced over there.”
He found ambulances and cop cars clogging Dickenson Drive leading from the Sandy Hook firehouse to the grade school nestled in the winter woods. “I saw two bloody little feet disappearing into the back of an ambulance. One distraught teacher hugged a traumatized little girl who was covered in someone else’s blood. I keep getting flashbacks to the loud ratcheting sounds of SWAT cops pumping big rifles.”
Stratford said police had handcuffed Rick Thorn, the school custodian, because he was the only living male in the school and they were certain because of the awful carnage that there had to be more than one shooter. “I vouched for the custodian, a great guy, and got him a blanket,” Stratford says. “I was in my school uniform and I started hurrying toward the school when a SWAT cop stopped me. I told him my son was in there. He told me, ‘If you go in there you’re gonna get killed.’ “
Stratford said he never felt more terrified or helpless before in his life as a father as he waited. And waited. And waited. “And then kids started filing out,” he says. “Hands on the shoulders of the classmate in front of them. I searched for Luke. I saw his teacher’s foot was mangled with a bullet, tearing her shoe open from front to back. No one had seen Luke. I was in a panic. And then I saw him, marching with schoolmates. I called his name. He glanced at me and nodded and I nodded back and it was the most blessed moment of my life to see him alive.” Stratford has been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder and has sought therapy and solace through prayer as a devout Catholic and a Eucharistic minister.
“Worst day ever in Newtown,” he says. “But just like you can’t have Easter without Good Friday, this tragedy has transformed us into a town of life, love and brotherhood. There’s a new cordiality. When you drive, people brake and wave you to go first. People you meet who have a connection to the shooting just nod in a wordless, knowing, embracing way. It’s forged us together.”
“After the shootings women just drifted through the supermarket aisles like zombies,” says his wife, Andrea, sitting in their dining room with their four sons — John, 18; William, 11; Luke, 6, and Jacob, 3. “No one spoke or looked at each other. Everyone was in shock. Because it seemed impossible this could happen here.”
William rides the daily school bus to the local middle school with two classmates who lost younger siblings in the shootings. “They’re my friends, and we all just stick together,” he says, tears flooding his eyes. “I just feel so bad for them.”
Andrea hugs William as Luke and Jacob sit on Dennis’ knees. “Now there’s a renewed spirit,” Andrea says. “It’s like Newtown has been resurrected in time for Easter.”
“There will always be Dec. 14, it will never go away,” says John, a Fordham student. “But we are no longer letting it define us.”
“I was at a gathering the other night in a nearby town,” says Andrea, “and someone said she heard the shootings had divided Newtown. I said no! You couldn’t feel more love, support, camaraderie in a community than in Newtown right now. The worst has brought out the best in us. I wouldn’t — couldn’t — live anywhere else.”
Dennis says Luke doesn’t know all that happened in his school but he has vivid detailed memories. “He remembers breaking glass. Policemen kicking in doors. That policemen hold guns with two hands, not one. That his teacher was fibbing when she said it was red paint coming out of her foot.”
Luke says, “It was blood.”
On a brighter note, John marvels at a mysterious Newtown enigma who on the birthday of each of the dead schoolkids ties hundreds of balloons of that kid’s favorite color all over Newtown. “No one knows who it is,” says John. “But it cheers up the whole town.”
So do the homilies of Msgr. Robert Weiss of St. Rose’s Catholic Church, who served eight funeral Masses. He sat in his rectory on Holy Thursday preparing his Easter homily. “This tragedy has brought more people to our church,” he says. “And where once a mom would bring her daughter to Sunday Mass while dad took his son to a ballgame, whole families come together now. There’s an amazing unity. The mantra in town, with green and white signs — the school’s colors — in store windows and bumper stickers is now, ‘Newtown Chooses Love.’ The common decency is overwhelming.”
He glances to a poster of all those killed on Dec. 14 behind him and wipes a tear. Even a priest who dispatches eight children to their eternal reward sometimes needs a priest himself.
He has seven priests coming from other parishes to help on Easter. “We’re holding eight Masses,” Weiss says. “I only have to do two Masses now. The Saturday afternoon Mass and the Daybreak Mass at 6 a.m. And my Easter homily will of course be about the Resurrection of Jesus and life after death in this great town.”
Dennis Stratford then walks me through a warehouse nicknamed Donation Central on Simm Lane, where 200,000 letters and cards from around the world were read by volunteers. “We also received 64,000 stuffed animals, 30,000 books, endless boxes of toys, mountains of school supplies, all kinds of food and dry goods,” says Kevin Kenney, a warehouse worker.
“The families of the shootings got first pick,” says Arlene Miles. “The rest went to women’s shelters, other schools and various charities of each family’s choice.”
“Newtown was also killed with kindness,” says Stratford.
“That’s true,” says Miles. “And working here for the last three months helped us through the pain.”
Later, I asked Jen Hubbard about what Catherine wore last Easter. “A pretty purple dress,” she said, laughing. “But she always refused to wear a bonnet. And she hated the patent leather shoes. She couldn’t wait to put on her black rain boots and go dig in the garden in her dress.”
She says her husband, Matt, aches for Catherine and that recently she found her son Freddie, 8, crying because he was mad at God for taking away his little sister. “I get it,” Jen Hubbard says. “I understand that Catherine was Daddy’s little girl and that he misses her so badly. And I told Freddie it was okay to be mad. But I tell them that the Devil took her earthly life away but God took her soul. That Catherine is in a far better place than any of us. She’s lucky because she’s where we’re all trying to get — heaven.”
So on Easter the Hubbard family will attend Mass at St. Rose’s and then ride up to the cemetery near the shuttered school to lay purple pansies on Catherine’s grave. “But she’s not really there,” Jen says. “Catherine’s in heaven and with me and my family every moment of every day. She’s still alive in spirit. Catherine is just fine and just waiting for us to join her. When I told Freddie that, he said he hopes she’s ready to wait a long time because he wants to live.”
She says her focus now is on the problems of the living, like this family that just got burned out.
“People of Newtown are focusing on rebuilding the family, being with their kids, praying more, and being nicer to each other,” she says. “Many people are pledging 26 acts of kindness for others to honor those 26 who died. So even though Catherine is missing in body this will be a great Easter. Because out of the pain and out of the darkness Newtown is resurrected.”
Amen.
