Choosing Hope: Moving Forward from Life's Darkest Hours Read online

  Praise for Choosing Hope

  “For anyone who has despaired at the human condition, at the horrors we perpetrate onto each other, Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis tells a story that shares our heartbreak and then, just as persuasively, offers us the only possible way forward.”

  —AMANDA RIPLEY, New York Times–BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF The Smartest Kids in the World AND The Unthinkable

  “Roig-DeBellis reveals one of the least known and most bewildering stories from the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. When she asked for a few common-sense accommodations for her traumatized first-graders—such as a better door and a ladder [leading] out [of] a window—she was told to stop asking. She didn’t, and she decided she couldn’t be silent about what mattered most. So she found a way to help all students nationwide with a new approach to teaching kindness.”

  —JAY MATHEWS, Washington Post EDUCATION COLUMNIST AND BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF Work Hard. Be Nice.

  “Choosing Hope is an inspiring story of a young teacher’s triumph over the unimaginable tragedy of the Sandy Hook school massacre. It is also a cautionary tale about school administrators who don’t listen. There are many more Kaitlins in our classrooms than we know. We must cherish them.”

  —TONY WAGNER, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF The Global Achievement Gap AND Creating Innovators

  “What a fantastic, straightforward, and authentic book. In Choosing Hope, Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis exemplifies the power of the five dimensions of crisis leadership by successfully confronting the critical questions that have long concerned those of us in the field of crisis leadership, such as controlling how deep into the emotional basement we fall and also how to ascend out of it. But all readers—especially teachers, parents, and those in emergency professions—will find much to stimulate their thinking in this book, which contains everything anyone needs to know about overcoming trauma. I’ll be recommending it to all of my colleagues.”

  —PROFESSOR ISAAC ASHKENAZI, INTERNATIONAL EXPERT FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP, BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

  “A beautifully written book that demonstrates the power of the human spirit.”

  —ADAM BRAUN, New York Times–BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF The Promise of a Pencil

  “Stranded on an island of unfathomable tragedy and profound despair in the days after she and her students survived the horror of the Sandy Hook murders, first-grade teacher Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis looked longingly at life proceeding on the mainland of normalcy. Choosing Hope is her moving account of how she returned to that mainland by promoting generosity and accessing faith and positive thinking. Readers who themselves are grieving may find comfort in Roig-DeBellis’s story and her design for moving forward.”

  —WALLY LAMB, New York Times–BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF We Are Water AND She’s Come Undone

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Scripture quotation here taken from the Good News Translation in Today’s English Version, second edition © 1992 by the American Bible Society.

  Scripture quotation here taken from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version) © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

  The Paradoxical Commandments are reprinted with the permission of the author © Kent M. Keith 1969, renewed 2001.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roig-DeBellis, Kaitlin.

  Choosing hope : moving forward from life’s darkest hours / Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis with Robin Gaby Fisher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-19359-8

  1. Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre, Newtown, Conn., 2012. 2. School shootings—Connecticut—Newtown. 3. Mental healing. 4. Psychic trauma. 5. Roig-DeBellis, Kaitlin. 6. Teachers—Connecticut—Newtown—Biography. I. Fisher, Robin Gaby. II. Title.

  LB3013.33.C8R64 2015 2015015834

  371.7’82097469—dc23

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  This book is dedicated to anyone who ever has gone, ever will go, or is now going through their own darkest hour and to those who helped me through mine. I am eternally grateful to each of you.

  “All glory comes from daring to begin.”

  —EUGENE F. WARE, from the poem “John Brown”

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Choosing Hope

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Letter

  Prologue

  CHOOSING YOUR PURPOSE

  2012

  The Common Denominator

  Mrs. Beaulier

  My Friends

  My Passion, My Purpose

  CHOOSING YOUR PERSPECTIVE

  Kate’s Day

  8 Snowberry Lane

  Twenty Miles

  MY DARKEST HOUR

  December 14, 2012

  The Firehouse

  The Interview

  The Day After

  December 16, 2012

  Amazing Grace

  Am I Really Here?

  Back to School

  CHOOSING TO OVERCOME

  The Questions I Could Answer

  Focusing on the Positive

  Standing for What’s Right

  Going Back

  My Kids

  My Friends, the Authors

  CHOOSING YOUR PATH

  Classes 4 Classes

  Action Is Healing

  CHOOSING HOPE

  Do It Anyway

  A Beautiful New Sunrise

  Moving Forward (Not On)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Classes 4 Classes

  October 2014

  To my Sixteen Fantastic Friends,

  This is the way we began each day, in a letter from me to you. The letter always explained, in detail, what we would do that day. It seemed the only appropriate way to begin this book, with a letter to you, to explain exactly why I wrote it.

  Above all else, I was inspired to write it for you. I wrote it because we’ve already had to endure our darkest hour (one I wish we hadn’t) and I want to inspire anyone else who is going through a difficult time to know that they can walk through their pain and come out on the other side, like we did.

  I wrote it because I want you to know that the choice of how to react to whatever happens in your life is yours alone to make and I hope that, no matter how challenging things may seem, you can always choose hope.

  Although our school year ended more than a year ago, and you are no longer my first-graders, I will always think of you as my students. I will remember how you wer
e each filled with enthusiasm, excitement, and passion for every lesson. I will remember your endless energy. It was contagious. I will remember your twinkling eyes and the happy spell they cast over me. I will remember how you were helpful and hardworking and kind. And I will always remember how brave and strong each of you was in the face of such horror.

  The theme of this book is choice. In your lives, you hold the power to make your own good choices. I wish for you that you choose your purpose, know it, follow it, and work hard at it. I wish for you that you choose a positive perspective on how you view the world around you (no matter what happens), and that you always stay open to the opportunities life will present. I wish for you that you are always able to overcome the hard times. And I wish that, no matter how hopeless something may seem, you always decide to choose hope.

  I am forever proud of every one of you, and eternally grateful for the honor of being your teacher.

  Love,

  Miss Roig

  PROLOGUE

  “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

  —ALICE, TO THE CHESHIRE CAT, IN LEWIS CARROLL’S Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Ilive every day wishing I could go back to December 13, back to who I was, who my kids were, back to our school with those who were taken on that day and the life I would never in a million years have changed.

  Sometimes I wonder how all of this happened. How, after finding myself in the midst of such abject darkness, in a place where breaking free seemed unlikely, if not impossible, I was finally able to get to the light. Did my strong faith play a role in my passage from that unimaginable tragedy? Yes, it did. Did the love of my family and friends and the support of a caring community bolster me as I attempted to put one foot in front of the other in the days and weeks afterward? Of course. But what saved me, when I dropped to my lowest point and wandered aimlessly between feelings of sadness and fear and maddening frustration over not being able to answer the “Why?” of what happened, was the moment I realized I had a choice. I could allow the actions of a monster to crush my spirit and, for the rest of my life, have that terrible day in Newtown define me. Or I could decide that, even in the wake of such unspeakable malice, I could live a purposeful life by choosing hope.

  The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was the worst mass murder of schoolchildren in the United States since the Bath School bombing in 1927, and a mournful chapter in our country’s narrative. I’ll leave it to others to write the historical account of that day. I’ll tell my story, but on my terms. I will not be exploitative: anyone who is looking for that should reach for a different book. I will bear witness to the trauma my students and I suffered, and, even more significantly, the acts of heroism that day, and the generosity of others that poured into our broken community afterward. I leave it to readers to decide whether they even want to read, in the section titled “My Darkest Hour,” about what we endured. You need not read those particular pages in order to capture the message of hope that I intend to convey with this book. I write about my personal experience for the purpose of clarity and perspective. It is that which led me to the path I walk today.

  Six of my colleagues and twenty first-graders—six- and seven-year-olds who were still learning to tell time, and count to 120, and spell 100 words—were murdered that morning. Teachers and administrators and support staff and children who acted with great courage in the face of death. By the grace of God, my students and I survived. When the shooting began and the killer stalked down the hallway toward our classroom, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake, I stuffed my frantic students into a first-grade bathroom that was too tiny for one adult and told them to stay perfectly quiet. I was certain we were going to die.

  I won’t say the shooter’s name. I never have. The only names that need to be memorialized are the innocent children and educators whose lives he took. To this day, I believe the killer came into our classroom, which was the first one in the hallway, and, thinking it was empty, moved to the next classroom, and the next, shooting everyone he saw. I’ll never know for sure.

  When you hear the whisper of death, life takes on a different meaning. Not a moment passes when I don’t recognize that it could have been us who didn’t make it out of the school that day. That all of my students and I did get out alive is, in my mind, nothing short of a miracle. I honor that miracle by not taking anything for granted. Not a beautiful sunset, or the gentle sensation of a loved one’s hand reaching for mine, or the sweet sound of a child’s voice, or a kind word from a stranger. Not for a second.

  Because we survived, I must live up to my responsibility to those who were silenced by using my voice to share what I have learned from standing at the precipice of death and, in doing so, making sure that day is not forgotten. Had it been my kids and me who were taken, I would have wanted someone to use his or her voice for good and to carry on the legacy of love and benevolence that, before evil visited, was the story of Sandy Hook.

  In the weeks after the shooting, I waded through my sorrow, wondering if I would ever feel joy again. I spent every day asking myself, Why our school? Why innocent children? When the answers wouldn’t come, I became increasingly frustrated and angry. Until, one day, I realized I would never answer those questions and I needed to concentrate on the ones I could answer, for the sake of both my students and me. Only then could we begin healing. Two questions guided me: How do I make sure that the deeds of a madman do not prevent us from moving forward to live good and meaningful lives? And how do we gain back the sense of control that he took from us? Those two questions led me in everything I did. Rather than consuming myself with the horror of what happened, I began focusing on the good that could be done, and how I might take part in our collective healing.

  When I changed my thinking, I was able to see opportunities. I founded a nonprofit called Classes 4 Classes, a concept to teach students everywhere the importance of kindness and caring for others. In my capacity as a survivor, I was asked to speak to a group of educators, which I reluctantly accepted. I started my presentation by sharing my story of hope and saw the impact it had on the audience. One speaking engagement led to dozens. Following every appearance, people came up to me to share their personal struggles—“I was just diagnosed with cancer”; “I lost my husband”; “My son is going through a difficult time”—and to thank me for inspiring them to focus on the possibilities rather than the negativity in their lives. They would often begin by saying things such as “I know this is nothing like what you’ve been through” or “My struggle can’t compare with yours,” and I would stop them each time and say, “Pain is pain and sadness is sadness and loss is loss and we are all connected in this.”

  After a few of these encounters, I decided that if, by sharing my personal story, I could help even one person through his or her darkest hour, then that was what I needed to do. I quickly realized that helping them was healing me. Sharing my message of hope became my calling. So when I was approached about writing a book, something that had never crossed my mind, I decided to seize the opportunity to be able to reach even more people.

  The Sandy Hook Elementary School I knew closed its doors for good after the shooting. Our beautiful school is dust now, razed to the soil because what it came to represent was too painful for a community to bear. And while teaching is at the core of who I am, my new classroom is wherever life takes me—to elementary schools, and teacher conferences, and college commencements, and anywhere else I am asked to speak.

  In my travels and, now, with my book, my purpose is to convey the importance of gratitude and endurance and, most of all, the power of choice. Yes, especially that. I know now that how you deal with life’s challenges, even those that may seem unbearable or hopeless, is your choice to make. Bad things happen to all of us, things that test us and impact us and change us, but it is not those moments that define who we are. It is how we choose to react to them that does.
You can give in and give up or you can decide to live your life with intent and love and compassion for others and for yourself. You can choose hope, even in the darkest hour, and in that choice you will find light. We have that power. I do. You do. Everyone does. That is what I believe.

  Ever since I was a little girl and my mom introduced me to Robert Frost, I have loved the poem “The Road Not Taken.” In that poem, Frost famously wrote,

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  When I reached a crossroads in my journey back from that terrible day in 2012, I chose hope. And that has made all the difference.

  My name is Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis and this is my story.

  CHOOSING YOUR PURPOSE

  “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

  —PABLO PICASSO

  2012

  It might sound like a cliché, but Sandy Hook Elementary School was a special place. When you walked through the front doors, you could just feel the love inside. It started at the top with our principal, a spirited, vivacious woman with a huge heart, and filtered down to the staff and the students. We just didn’t have bad days at Sandy Hook. It was always sunny inside. My teaching career began there, and I can honestly say that if someone had offered me another job for three times the salary, I would have turned it down.

  I started the 2012 school year with the same anticipation and excitement I had on my first day of teaching there, six years earlier. Sixteen new little rosy faces. Clean slates. Six- and seven-year-olds who were happy to be in school and keen to learn. I was eager to grow with my new class. Teachers know that our personal growth is what makes us effective in the classroom, so I’d always tried to gain as much experience as I could pack into my schedule. I knew I was a good teacher, but I always aimed to be better. That year, I’d signed on for the committee for language arts, which focused on instituting a new reading program for our students. When I wasn’t doing that, I was helping to refine the first-grade curriculum, or studying new and innovative teaching skills, or coaching students for Marathon Mondays, a running club for third- and fourth-graders, many of them former students of mine who knew about my passion for long-distance running. But my favorite thing was being in the classroom with my first-graders. For me, it was occupational bliss.