I live in Milford, Conn., a pastoral community of roughly 53,000. We're about 26 miles south of Newtown, a town of about 27,000 and tucked within it lies the 18th century village of Sandy Hook. To call Sandy Hook quaint is like calling the Kardashians overexposed. Matter of fact, Bruce Jenner even graduated from Newtown High School.
In addition to being a Connecticut resident, I'm a tutor; my mom is a fifth-grade teacher, and her mother was a high-school geometry and trig teacher. I don't have children, but consider myself a mother to my furry friend Wally, and have loved every child I've ever explained which way the printed 'e' should go or whose drawings of me on the subway or in a field of sunflowers graces my bedroom wall.
It's trite to say this is a day of mourning, or that our hearts go out to the victims, but it's still worth saying.
What's less obvious is that every journalist covering this story has, in a sense, gone to battle. Down on the front lines one can see the strain etched on the faces of Diane Sawyer, Soledad O'Brien, Anderson Cooper and all my local newscasters here in Southeastern Connecticut. I watched WTNH and sobbed as Keith Kountz was forced to share what had to have been the toughest story of his career apart from 9-11.
I bucked up and pitched one of the major news agencies in the world. I told the editors in the UK I was very near the story, and was thanked for reaching out.
Then I sat back, drew a breath, collected myself and started making mental notes of the details. How would I form the "story"? Who would I approach and who would I avoid? I watched news crews gently lean in and talk to children, always with their shaken parents of course. I asked myself if I too could talk to those children? Could I push a microphone into a distraught parent's face, much less gather outside the school the day bodies had been identified?
In 1984 I drove to Chowchilla, California to interview a young mother by the name of Darla Daniels. She had been one of the children kidnapped in the famous case of 1976. It was a seminal event of my upbringing, for I was 14, almost 15, when the tale of those 26 kidnapped kids and their heroic bus driver Ed Ray made national news.
This was before the Internet. I didn't "chat" with my friends or text anyone at the time. Instead, I would go to sleep wondering how I would survive such an ordeal, or would I? Passing a schoolbus inevitably led to the many questions our community had, and driving past the quarry, so close to my beloved Shadow Cliffs recreational area, brought chills.
"I still have nightmares," Daniels told me in 1984. I was a young, aspiring reporter working on a project for my magazine writing class. I remember sitting beside her and hearing how tortured the "kids" still were, many of them re-envisioning their hours under the ground, sobbing, being ordered at gunpoint to shut the hell up!
I got an A-plus on that paper. My professor said it should have been in Life Magazine.
Today, I look back on that conversation with Daniels, remembering how shattered those kids lives' were. Their
long-lasting symptoms would include a host of ills - from panic attacks, nightmares of kidnappings leading to
their deaths, substance abuse and spending time in prison for what a UCSF psychiatrist said was "doing something controlling to somebody else."
If I were to interview Daniels today, would I see a different woman? Has she become bitter? Been through multiple divorces, jobs, rehab, etc., or instead has she grown into the mature woman I sensed she was becoming back in the 80s?
As a journalist, we play the role of both detached observer and soldier in these crises. We have to be tough enough to get into battle, to hear about everything from bloodied children and gunfire to terrified parents who would wait at a fire station, only to be told their kids were not among the living. We have to be able to hold the microphone as steadily as we comport ourselves.
It's not easy. It's not natural. And some would argue, on many days it's not even human.
That is why I, as a freelance writer, have great respect for the talented journalists down in the trenches on this one. Each of them cares. Each of them goes back to their hotel room sobbing, recollecting a day of horrific loss and streaming chaos. It's a world for only the strongest souls and the best communicators. But it is a responsibility we owe to our communities.
