Open Letter to Sandy Hook Elementary

Open Letter to Sandy Hook Elementary

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Brett Haymaker.  You do not know me.  We have never met.  It seems my writing you a letter was inevitable – at least, in part, put into motion over 54 years ago in the humble Northrop Memorial Auditorium at the University of Minnesota.

It was there, on October 12, 1958, that Archibald MacLeish delivered a reluctant lecture he called, “Poetry and Journalism.”  You have probably never heard of Archibald MacLeish, or of this particular lecture.  This, of all things, I understand, as I came very close myself to never hearing of him, or, for that matter, reading any of his works.  In a few words, MacLeish was a native to the state of Illinois, a lawyer, a journalist, and a poet.  In fact, MacLeish won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  Twice. 

It is because of this lecture, or, rather, what MacLeish outlined in this lecture, that I am writing to you today.  That, coupled with the paralyzing grief that has descended upon our nation as a result of your friends and children being ripped away from this life too early.  A grief that, as a man, as a single person on planet earth, I have not been able to process, for the tools in my possession to process such emotion, and to such an extent, seem antiquated and entirely inadequate in the face of such violence. 

And, perhaps, that is the most dangerous part about this grief.  Because I don’t know how to bring it into language, I want to skip right over it, to forget about it.  But I believe you are important.  That what happened in Newtown is important.  That continuing to live here, in this place, and to continue to feel my way through the world, is important.  Because one day, I will have children – like you – and I want to know what, exactly, is at stake.

And so I turn to you, and offer you this open letter, because I believe we come face to face with inexplicable moments in our lives, moments that lack a why, without logic, without mercy, moments that can’t be explained but, god damn it, they can be felt.  I believe you are important, important enough to be understood emotionally – not just the facts, not just another headline.  Not this time.  I believe we need to feel this one and carry with us the knowledge we get from the experience of feeling it. 

Let me tell you why I am sad.

“Journalism tends to be dispassionate and objective,” said MacLeish, “whereas poetry turns to emotional significance apart from the event itself.  What distinguishes poetry from journalism, aside from obvious distinctions of form – uses of words, patterns of words, sequences of words – is not a difference in kind but a difference in focus. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world; poetry with the feel of the world.”

“Though we are provided with more facts than any previous generation,” MacLeish continued, “we are not necessarily possessed of more knowledge of those facts. We are deluged with facts, but we have lost, or are losing, our human ability to feel them. But ... the poem has lost its power in men’s minds. We know with the head now, by the facts, by the abstractions.”

MacLeish said that in 1958, long before MSNBC, FOX News, and the Internet twitter-verse of up-to-the-minute news streaming into our lives through a handful of devices simultaneously.  It’s true.  We are deluged in information, much of it journalistic in nature, objective, reactionary. 

I learned about the shooting at your school at the tail-end of my lunch break, two hours after the first shot was fired, as a co-worker read the headline off of her iPhone news app.  Two minutes later, I was back at work.  Five hours after that, I was sitting down at my desk with a cup of coffee, I opened the Huffington Post and was reminded of what I had, in five hours’ time, forgotten – that 20 six-year-old children in Newtown, CT, had been executed in their school by a man wielding a semi-automatic rifle.

Let me tell you why I am sad.

I have never been to Newtown, let alone the proud state of Connecticut.  I grew up in Hellertown, Pennsylvania – a town, I imagine, much like Newtown (and not far from Nickel Mines, Lancaster County).  There, I went to school in the Saucon Valley School District – a school, I imagine, very similar to yours – Sandy Hook. 

When I was your age – about six or seven – my family took a road trip to a shallow barrier peninsula in New Jersey, a national park called Sandy Hook.  That is the Sandy Hook that I have come to know.  The same Sandy Hook that I cannot help but think of when I think of you. 

It was there that I was stung by my first jellyfish.  A few days before we arrived, a severe storm out at sea had churned up the seafloor and pushed, with the resulting current, thousands of dying jellyfish toward, what would become, my Sandy Hook.  They were just washing ashore as we arrived on the beach with our sunscreen and towels and ham and cheese sandwiches and chipped ice and, most of all, our innocence intact.  It simply happened that way.  Nobody could have predicted, or prevented, the scene unfolding as it unfolded.

Sandy Hook became our family go-to for weekend getaways.  It smelled of rotting seaweed and horseshoe crabs.  It was the same place my sister buried me in the sand three different times, two of the three sculpting an exaggerated woman’s body for my exposed head.  The same place the salt water cleansed an infected wound on my chin.  The same place I first witnessed dolphins riding the surf.  The same place a man threw his shoe at a seagull and tore its wing away from its body.  Sometimes there is no why, but there ought to be.

At the northern tip of the peninsula, there is a designated portion of beach called Gunnison Beach.  This was, for me, when I was your age, a legendary spot, as this was, and is still, a nude beach.  I went there once, as a teenage boy, hoping to score the sight of beautiful, well-oiled women lounging in the sun, the same women I had concocted in my adolescent visions.

My surprise was rather theatrical when, upon entering  Gunnison Beach, no women were to be seen.  Instead, I had about a hundred scattered, grey-haired men, their skin sagging in their well-earned tans.  I recall running back to the car, hollering, “Alright! Alright!  I’ve seen enough!” with my parents chuckling in a we-told-you-this-would-happen sort of way. 

It is this last recollection, of all of my recollections concerning Sandy Hook, New Jersey, that makes me the most sad.  Because there are twenty of you who will never be stung by a jellyfish; never see a dolphin propel itself along the crest of a crashing wave; never lie naked on a beach with your high school sweetheart; never rub sunscreen on your child’s back; never wake up to the sound of your lover moving about in an adjacent room; never sip a cup of coffee in the snow; never feel the tickle of champagne on your nose on New Year’s Eve; never see the moon eclipse the sun or the rings of Saturn; never read Whitman or Dickinson or Keats. 

And the causes and motives leading up, and contributing, to this massacre will be discussed at length by the talking heads, and your deaths will, most likely, be politicized in every column in every newspaper across this country, and we will try – I will try – to rationalize a roundabout positive outcome, such as, “You remind us of what’s important,” and I’ll see parents hug their children a little tighter.  But that makes no difference to you.  For you – the result remains the same.  There are dead among you.  No more opportunities for laughter or disappointment or surprise. 

Try to imagine that day.  The sudden omnipotence of invisible pain.  The shock written on my face as I stormed from the water and plopped down on my towel, holding my pink thigh, desperately trying to determine what caused the stinging.  I looked at my Mom and she said, “Yep.  That’s from a jellyfish, alright. Somebody has to pee on it.” 

And try to imagine my sister, mounting my thigh as if it were the back of a panic-stricken horse.  And with only a, “Stay still,” she pressed her pelvic bone down and, releasing with it, the hot salvation she held inside of her.  What is that but vulgar, familial love?

I began to wonder if, like from Manhattan, you could see Sandy Hook, New Jersey from Newtown.  Obviously, one cannot.  Not in a direct line of sight, anyway.  That didn’t stop me from looking it up on Google Maps, though.

131 miles.  That’s how far Newtown, CT is from Sandy Hook National Park.  It’s a two and a half hour drive if you take I-95.  Not terribly far. 

I wondered more still.  What would this map – the map I created linking Sandy Hook, New Jersey to Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut – look like if I zoomed out?  What would I gain from shifting the perspective?  I zoomed and zoomed, out to the farthest my map would allow me to go, until I saw this:

From all the way up there – whether it be the sky or outer space or some imaginary vantage point - it appeared as if there was just a single Sandy Hook.  Perhaps, that day, God got them confused.  And the catastrophic thing he had planned to happen in Sandy Hook, New Jersey – like the beaching of a cargo ship carrying six hundred white horses, and those same frightened horses diving into the water, galloping up and down the seaweed strewn beach; or, perhaps, a Coast Guard Captain’s navigational instruments flicker for a few moments before failing and he becomes stranded at sea; or maybe it was the ferry’s engine – the one coming from Manhattan – overheating and the passengers become thirsty for a few hours until the ferry's mechanic completes his troubleshooting.  Except none of those things happen on December 14, 2012.

Instead, the jellyfish continued to wash up on shore, and a man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into your school.

“Newspaper stories tell us about names and titles, distances and populations, fatality totals and investigations,” MacLeish writes. “Poems tell us about ourselves.”

If you get the chance, go to Sandy Hook, New Jersey.  Skip seashells across the breakers.  Carve their  beloved names into the sand.  Wade out into the water.  It is there, in that murky green, where you will  feel the sting as you brush up against the dying.

As ever,

Brett