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The Last Bus Stop Goodbye (For Parkland, Newtown, …)

Today I dropped off my daughter at school, the way I do every day.

Some mornings are an orderly, measured endeavor; but more often they’re a frantic, swirling tumult of missing socks, forgotten homework assignments, and lost permission slips—all leading to a last furious rush to get her out the door on time. Some days there is a literal sprint up the slow incline of our street, as we see the bus rounding the corner and arrive breathless and disheveled as its doors unfold with a squeal.

And then there is a goodbye; a quick kiss on the head or caress of the shoulder, and a speedy “Have a good day, honey… Love you.”

A flash, an instant, and that’s it.

And honestly there is often an exhale as the bus door closes; the relief that we’ve somehow made it again.

That moment always feels commonplace, so stunningly ordinary; never like it could possibly be goodbye for the last time.

But for some parents, it has been goodbye for the last time.

Some parents’ final moments with their sons and daughters, were in that hurried, hectic, so easily overlooked bus stop or curbside instant; one whose gravity they could never have realized at the time. It was the moment they last saw their child alive.

Reading Parkland father Fred Guttenburg’s reflection today on the one year anniversary of his beautiful Jaime’s murder at school, I found myself looking at my daughter across the room, as she finished the last, now soggy remaining Cheerios and lazily pulled her socks on; wondering if this could be our last ordinary morning together.

What if this was goodbye for good?

My stomach was sickened at the very thought, and my first instinct was not to let my mind go there—but Mr Guttenburg deserves that I go there.
Jaime deserves that I go there.
The Parkland families deserve we go there.
The Sandy Hook families deserve it.
The families of every student in between them; who said their final goodbye at the bus stop, who’ve had to spend their lives with such unthinkable attrition, all because our nation treasures and protects guns more than children—deserves we go to that black and terrifying place.

Every parent getting their kids off to school today, and every aunt and grandpa and cousin who has a beloved child’s school photo stuck to their refrigerator or pinned in their cubicle or pasted into their phone’s lock screen, should go to that terrible place in their heads, so that they aren’t lulled into apathy or shielded from sadness or distracted away from the urgency of these days.

Because no matter how earnestly we might desire to step into the shoes of parents who’ve children have been murdered at school—we simply can’t. It is surely beyond what can be comprehended by those of us whose children also got off the bus at the end of the day.

Whatever hell I imagine Jaime’s father is going through today or how heavy I think the grief is for her family or how massive I imagine the loss is, I know it pales when placed up against their reality—a reality that is surely as gut-wrenching today as that day a year ago.

We should all be grieving today.

We should be lamenting so many cruel final curbside moments, and we should be doing all we can to make sure every kid comes home.

The bus stop shouldn’t be goodbye for good.

 

 

Get John’s book, ‘Hope and Other Superpowers’ HERE.

 

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