In the fall of 1927, my mother started elementary school in North Philadelphia; my dad, in Cedar Rapids, didn't go to school until the following year. She has been dead for fifteen years now, and he turned 89 last week. 1927 was a long time ago, by most measures; there wasn't any Super Bowl or professional basketball. Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee weren't yet household names. The Miss America pageant and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade were brand new events. A long time ago, and even if my parents had lived in Bath, Michigan, they wouldn't have been in its Consolidated School that May, when the national tradition we continued this weekend began, the tradition of the school massacre.
I've never been to Bath; I couldn't find it on a map. But I have thought about it a lot, thought about the weight of grief that time still can't have lifted off that town. The people of Bath were united in mourning, a terrible thing to unite people, but I imagine everyone eventually went off to mourn alone, after a time, and one by one they all were gone, too, like their children. And what was left was a certain notorious distinction the crime lent to their community, until enough time had passed for it to become a bit hazy and almost unreal.
It was real, though, and there is probably still grief in Bath, eighty-five years later, and that's one of the many things that makes me sad about Newtown. There are a lot of years left in this century, and they'll all be taken up in the slow business of what we call healing in these situations. We call it healing, but it isn't healing, there is no healing; there's only learning to tolerate the pain.
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