1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Washington Post Sandy Hook story

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Dec 15, 2015.

  1. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    This is two years old, but because of yesterday's anniversary, I suppose, it was back at the top of the Washington Post's most-read stories list today.

    It is amazing. I have a boy the age of those kids. I can't fathom.

    After Newtown, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet

    Mark could see himself that morning, too, rushing out of the house at 10, knowing only that shots had been fired at Sandy Hook and parents would be reunited with their children at the firehouse. Jackie had started driving from Pawling, calling and texting him again and again. “Do you have him?” “DO YOU HAVE HIM YET?” A priest had announced that the principal had been killed, and Mark had wondered: “How will we explain this to Daniel?” Then the same priest had said 20 children were also dead, and there was shrieking and vomiting in the firehouse, and Mark had imagined Daniel running alone in the woods behind the school. He was fast. He had escaped.

    Then the governor was in front of them, and he was saying, “No more survivors,” and a state trooper was driving Mark and Jackie home.
     
  2. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    To all Sandy Hook truthers: Fuck you. Read this. And then if you're still a full-blown idiot, fuck you with a rusty shovel.
     
    Last edited: Dec 15, 2015
  3. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    It's one of the best pieces of journalism in the last 10 years.

    May you be so fortunate one day as to hear Eli talk about how he reported it and wrote it.
     
    YankeeFan likes this.
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I sympathize with the sentiment, but I honestly don't even want to give them the satisfaction of acknowledging them.

    What is astonishing in the Post piece, to me, is how effectively he draws out the little beats of parenthood (and childhood). How the kid walked to the bus. How he felt he had to leave somewhere because "Christmas Vacation," of all movies, was on. You read these things and you smile a little bit in recognition. Kids are quirky. But the writer never lets you forget too long: Now he's gone. Like that. One boy in a big pile of bodies in the corner of his classroom. (I don't want to hate Adam Lanza, but this piece sure brings me close to it without even really trying to accomplish that.)

    I think the writer also does a tremendous job portraying the drudgery of these parents' attempt to give meaning to their child's death (and their own lives). There's no triumph at the end. There's no happy ending. They just keep going.
     
  5. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    I'm a fan of twitter, and can sometimes be rightly accused of overestimating how much attention something is getting, because it can become an echo chamber.

    There are so few people who believe this, that they really don't deserve attention. They have no following.

    What they say isn't going to upset any family member, unless someone amplifies their words. We should stop doing that.
     
  6. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    I imagine many of the Sandy Hook parents have other children who are still with us. It has to be especially difficult to not let their loss spill over excessively into their surviving children's lives. My wife had an older brother who died of what they think was Reye's Syndrome (a year before she was born; she was a replacement child), and that loss was ever-present. The family pressed on, but for the parents no happiness was ever untempered.
     
  7. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    With mortality rates being what they are these days, sometimes I find it remarkable how common this used to be. I am reading a biography on Dwight Eisenhower right now. He lost a son to scarlet fever, I think. It gets like one paragraph in the biography so far, and an occasional passing mention about how the Eisenhowers were still pretty sad sometimes about their son's death.
     
  8. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Yes, it was quite common. Bigger families, riskier environment.

    Until I was a grown man, I had it in my head that my father was the eighth of nine children (four boys, five girls). Turns out nine survived to adulthood ... he had a younger brother who died (leukemia I think) when my father was about eight years old. My father once talked about his memories of it, how the hospital had called his parents and told them to hurry up, their son was dying, and how for a long time as a boy my father had it in his head if his parents had just gotten there sooner his brother wouldn't have died. When my father died I wrote his little formulaic obit and I remembered to mention his younger brother in it ... Some of his surviving siblings were astonished I even knew about it.
     
  9. JackReacher

    JackReacher Well-Known Member

    Is Saslow 30 yet? The work he's done in what seems like such a short time is nothing short of incredible.
     
  10. TyWebb

    TyWebb Well-Known Member

    After re-reading that story, I was left wondering if he had kids. Those tidbits that Dick mentioned really stuck out and I'm not sure I, someone who doesn't have kids, would have had the touch and awareness to use effectively. It really felt like he understood those moments and memories that a parent has of their kids.
     
  11. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Yes, 30. (33 actually).

    Yes, kids.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I wondered the same thing as I read it. It wouldn't have occurred to me to push for those kind of details, or to understand their significance, before I had kids. Everybody thinks their kid is special and unique, of course. But reading that Post piece reinforced it to me: Every kid actually is special and unique.
     
    Big Circus likes this.
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page