Choosing Hope: Moving Forward from Life's Darkest Hours

by Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis

  I desperately wanted my independence again, to get back to the point where I was in control of my emotions rather than my emotions controlling me, to reclaim my lost self. I lived twenty-nine years with the passion and purpose to teach children, to enable their success, and I wanted to be that person again. I just didn’t know how. So how would I help my students?

  After about two and a half weeks, I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I was. I was stuck on a path to nowhere, with no sense of how to get off. Perhaps someone else could guide me in another direction. But who? I wondered. All I knew for sure was that something had to happen if I were to save myself.

  My mom was the first person to suggest that I see a therapist. Without my knowledge, she and my best friend Casey were talking regularly by phone about the state I was in and how they might help me. When Mom said she’d already made an appointment for me with a well-respected trauma therapist in the area, I didn’t resist. I knew I needed help.

  My first appointment with the therapist was at the end of December. Nick accompanied me to her office. We arrived a few minutes early and signed in at the front desk. A security officer directed us to an office on the first floor. We walked in and Dr. Purcell greeted us warmly. “Please, come in,” she said, smiling. I liked her right away. Her poise and self-assurance gave me confidence that maybe she really could guide me back to the Kaitlin I was before. Nick and I sat next to each other on her couch.

  “Does it lock?” I asked, glancing at her office door.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No one has ever asked me that before. I’ll check.” She disappeared for a minute and then returned with a key, locking us in. “Kaitlin,” she said, “I need to let you know that you’re safe here. You don’t need to be afraid.”

  For the next hour, I told Dr. Purcell everything from the day of the tragedy. The crackle of gunfire. The shattering glass. The desperate search for someplace to hide. Jamming my kids into an impossibly tiny bathroom. Trying to keep them quiet and calm, knowing that the killer was just a few steps away. Hearing those awful sounds of cornered people pleading for mercy. Waiting for what seemed an interminable amount of time, expecting that at any moment the gunman would discover us and we all would die. As difficult as it was, revisiting what had happened, I found my words spilling out. Dr. Purcell was visibly moved hearing about what my students and I endured. “You were so brave,” she said. “You acted so quickly. You saved your students’ lives.”

  It was hard for me to admit my thoughts, which sometimes sounded crazy, even to me, but if I didn’t tell my therapist, how could she help me? Toward the end of the session, I confessed that I sometimes questioned the validity of my own story. I’d asked myself, “How did we all fit in that bathroom? We couldn’t have, so we must not have. I must be imagining it. How did I pull that cabinet in front of the door? There had been another smaller bookcase next to it. How did I get it out of my way? It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “But you did do those things,” she said. “That’s why you and your students are still here.”

  “It’s hard to believe I’m here,” I said, weighing my words. “Sometimes I don’t think I really am. Sometimes I think that I’m really dead and that this is some other place—maybe even heaven.”

  Dr. Purcell didn’t flinch. “You’re alive,” she said, her eyes soft and kind. “I’m looking right at you. And, yes, your kids made it out of the school.”

  The time passed so quickly and there was so much I still had to say. I made a second appointment for later that week, determined to do whatever it took to be able to feel normal again. Nick came with me for my second appointment and the one after that. Each time, the therapist and I revisited the same theme. How did I know my students and I were alive? “How do I know you’re real?” I asked. Dr. Purcell spent hours patiently reassuring me that everything I was seeing and feeling was actual and authentic. Her reassurances helped me to feel calmer for a while, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might be dead and, even worse, I hadn’t been able to save my students and they, too, were gone. Had I seen them shot? I wondered. Is that why I couldn’t remember?

  After several sessions, when I still couldn’t be convinced that we were all alive, Dr. Purcell took a different tack. “Kaitlin, look,” she said, finally. “Just think about this: You keep asking if you’re in heaven, but heaven is nothing but good and peace and happiness. You’re afraid of everything, so how can this be heaven?” What she said really resonated with me.

  I had grown up believing that heaven was a reward, that if you were a good person and lived your life in the service of God you got to go there when you die. If my faith was as strong as I believed it was, she had to be right. There was no suffering in heaven. “Yes,” I said. “That makes sense. This can’t possibly be heaven. Heaven wouldn’t feel this way.” It was the last time I asked.

  From then on, my therapy focused on preparing me to go back to work. Classes were scheduled to resume on January 3 in a refurbished school building about seven miles from Sandy Hook, in the neighboring town of Monroe. The school had been closed for two years, but was cleaned, painted, and renamed Sandy Hook Elementary during the three-week recess.

  The staff was invited for an early visit to the school to survey our new classrooms and get everything in order. I was more interested in safety than furniture and paint. Looking around my room, I saw right away that there was no place to hide. No tiny bathroom. No closets. And the windows were too high to jump from, even if we had the chance to escape. I decided, right then, that before our first day back I had to come up with a safety plan. My students needed to know that, should there be an emergency, we had a blueprint for how to get away.

  I took up the issue with my therapist during my next visit with her. “My students are very aware that the only way we survived is because we had a place to hide,” I said. “That’s the first thing they’ll see when they come back—that there’s no hiding place. I need a plan.” Dr. Purcell agreed a plan was necessary, and we went to work devising a list of ways my students and I could feel confident in our new surroundings.

  The plan required asking the administration to provide a few things. First, a new classroom door, because the old one had an oblong glass panel alongside it that someone could easily break to access the lock. Then, a fireman’s type of rung ladder, which we could hang from our window and use as a get away if we had to. Third, metal grates installed on the glass windows on either side of the school’s main entrance (which were similar to the windows that had been shot out so the shooter could get into our school). And, last, a security guard at the back of the school, at least for the first couple months, and a mental health professional in the classroom to guide me in helping my students reacclimate to the classroom and learn coping mechanisms to deal with their distress.

  Having the safety plan gave me the confidence I needed to return to the classroom. I needed to get back, to begin to conquer my own fears and to help my students to overcome theirs, so that one day they could return to being the happy-go-lucky children they deserved to be.

  I thought I was ready.

  Back to School

  Iwent back to school with a clash of emotions. The thought of returning to class with my students felt absolutely right, but the crater of emptiness left by those who were missing was breathtaking. With the new school came poignant reminders of what once was. There was no happy banter with our beloved principal at the front door, only two uniformed police officers and reverential silence. No joyful sounds of children from the neighboring classroom, just an empty place where they should have been. It all felt surreal. Awful. Terrible. Wrong. Sickening.

  At the same time, the distance from what happened gave my students and me a sense of separation from the tragedy. In some way, it felt like a new chance. The district had done a nice job of replicating our classroom in the new school. Our desks and cubbies, books and toys from Sandy Hook had been
moved to our new room before classes started up. Someone had even hung up the jackets the students had left in their haste to get out of our old school.

  At 8:55 a.m., like always, my students filed in, as excited to see me as I was to see them. I put on my best face, determined to make the day as comfortable as I could for my kids. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but within minutes I could feel an energy change from our old classroom, a change resulting from the hell my students had been through. Because their trust and sense of security had been shattered, it almost felt as if we were strangers at the beginning of the school year who were just getting to know one another. I knew I had my work cut out for me.

  My mom was a huge help. I was asked, prior to the restart of school, if I wanted a guest teacher to assist me through the end of the school year, but I’d declined because it felt like another unwelcome change. Still, I realized that I needed an extra set of hands. My students were in a strange school and didn’t know their way around, and I couldn’t leave them alone in the classroom to walk someone to the nurse, or the lunchroom, or the lavatory. I had asked my mom if she’d be willing to help and she kindly agreed. She was a reassuring presence, for me and for my students, as were the parents who came in and out to support their children.

  That first day, I decided I’d dive right in and pick up where we’d left off a month earlier. For the sake of familiarity, I wanted to stick to our former routine—announcements, attendance, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. When it came time for morning meeting, we all sat in a circle and I could feel the tension begin to ease.

  “Good morning, Fantastic Friends!” I said in my perkiest voice.

  “Good morning, Miss Roig,” they responded in unison.

  First-graders are people pleasers, and mine were trying so hard to be “normal” for me and for one another that my heart broke for them. I was grateful for their sweet smiles, but I saw adult-sized sorrow in their eyes. I wanted to sweep each one of them up in a big bear hug and tell them it was okay to be sad and afraid, that I was, too. But it was my job to stay upbeat and optimistic and allow them to just be children again, at least until they asked for more. That was the one thing I was afraid of: that one of them would ask something I couldn’t answer. For instance, Why? Why did this happen? Why did that man do what he did?

  Those early days played out in fits and starts. I quickly discovered that, in many ways, it was as if we were back at the beginning of the school year. We were in a brand-new space, and even though the district had done its best to make sure our classroom looked the same, everything was different. My students had to relearn all the things they’d known before the tragedy, from how to carry scissors in the classroom to where to return their supplies and how to organize their desks. It was clear they were suffering, but they weren’t able to verbalize their thoughts. A first-grader’s ability to articulate feelings is so different from an adult’s. It wasn’t like dealing with someone who was more mature and could tell you, “I lost my best friend,” or, “That was the boy I played with every day.” First-graders typically don’t express their feelings with words, but their affect told me everything I needed to know. They were generally more introverted, more cautious, quieter. I noticed that the shy students, who had come out of their shells before the shooting, were once again too timid to even raise their hands. I knew it was because they were trembling inside. How could they not have been? I certainly was.

  The biggest obstacle I faced was trying to teach around my students’ limited attention spans. Or nonexistent attention spans, I should say. They were so anxious and out of sorts that when I was giving a lesson, I’d look out over the class and find that I’d lost half of them before I really got started. Rather than being engaged in the lessons, which they were before the tragedy, now they were “checking out,” yawning and squirming and whispering to their neighbors. I’d see them looking up at the ceiling or staring off into space or fidgeting with their hands in their laps. They were always asking for permission to get up to go to the bathroom, or to get a tissue or a drink. Lessons I usually taught in one session were taking three and four. We worked at a slower pace, and I still wasn’t sure I was getting through to them.

  Every class was interrupted when at least one student, and usually three or four, had a breakdown after hearing an unfamiliar noise coming from upstairs, or the hallway, or the parking lot, and understandably so. When we first got to the new school, we were unaware that construction work was being done in the classroom above ours. The sound of someone dragging a box across the floor upstairs was enough to send one little boy into a fetal position. He curled up into himself, shaking and sobbing hysterically. My heart broke as I tried to console him. Of course, I understood the depth of his fear because all of us felt it. When one student broke down, I could usually calm him or her with soft words and a walk down the hallway. When three or four reacted, we stopped what we were doing, dimmed the lights, put on music, and colored or did yoga poses together.

  Often I’d read a story, trying to distract them from their fears. So many family members and close family friends had dropped off children’s books they thought would be good for such times. The books were about love and compassion and good-heartedness. A favorite was an illustrated book by Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell, Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born . . . “Tell me again how you and Daddy were curled up like spoons and Daddy was snoring . . . Tell me again how you called Granny and Grandpa right away but they didn’t hear the phone because they sleep like logs.” I put all the books on a ledge by my whiteboard to remind myself to read at least one each day.

  Whenever something—a sound or a sight or a smell—triggered one of my students, I addressed it with the whole class. I’d say, “Okay, friends, we just heard a noise. I heard it, too. It was a desk being pulled across the floor upstairs. I’m doing okay. Are you?”

  Sometimes, I’d call down to the office where the police officers were stationed and say, “We heard something and we are a little nervous. Can you please check and report back to us?” They were so compassionate and reassuring. They always got right back to us.

  Sharing with my students, letting them see that we were all in this together and everything possible was being done to keep us safe, usually helped to bring them around, at least for a little while. But those discussions inevitably opened up a floodgate of questions.

  “Miss Roig, do you remember that scary day?”

  “Absolutely! Yes, I do! I remember that scary day very well. But we’re in a new school and we have police officers here as our helpers and they are watching our school for the bad guys.”

  “Miss Roig, are the bad guys going to come here?”

  “That’s why the police officers are here, so that can’t happen. That’s their job, to keep people safe from the bad guys.”

  “But Miss Roig, what if the bad guys do get in? Where would we hide?”

  “I have a plan,” I promised my class. “I’ll be able to tell you about it soon.”

  I PRESENTED MY IDEAS to the acting principal during our first week back. I needed a few extra things to give my students the sense of security they needed, I said. The safety precautions the district had taken were prudent. I had heard repeatedly that ours was the safest school in the United States, and I believed it was. But, except for the police presence, our old school had also had a comprehensive safety strategy, and look what happened there. A buzzer and camera system, lockdown procedures and safety drills, and a partnership with local responders were all positive precautionary measures, but none of those things stopped the shooter from getting into Sandy Hook. As my students’ protector, I needed to know that everything possible was being done to make them feel safe and secure. They were astutely aware that we’d survived the first time because we had a place to hide and now we didn’t have that. If a bad guy were to get into our class, we were sitting ducks. And even the addition of a police presence hadn’t been
enough to reassure them about that. Bad guys killed police officers, too.

  I explained to the principal that I needed to do something to give my students and their parents some confidence that we were safe in our new school. I felt that, in order for them to stop focusing on the possibility of imminent danger, they needed reassurances that would help them to feel more in control. With that in mind, I said, I’d come up with a specialized plan tailored to our special circumstances that I thought might help make everyone feel more secure. I shared with her the list of suggestions that I thought were very doable: a new classroom door, a fireman’s ladder, a security guard behind the school, a temporary mental-health professional in the classroom, and metal grates on the windows framing the main entrance. I explained that I believed having those things would help to ease at least some of the anxiety my students and I were feeling, as well as answer the questions being raised by some parents—specifically, what was our classroom safety plan?

  The principal listened politely until I had finished making my case. “I don’t think it’s necessary,” she said. I hadn’t even considered she might reject my plan out of hand, but I sensed, at that moment, that our conversation was over and the subject was closed. She had plenty to do in the wake of the tragedy, and meeting the special needs of my class didn’t seem to be high on her priority list. But it was at the top of mine.

  I say the following to illustrate the point. Sandy Hook Elementary was a big place. K–4. Just under five hundred students. A sixty-six-thousand-square-foot rectangle with an outdoor courtyard in the center. That’s nearly ten thousand square feet larger than a football field. The school had four main hallways, one for each grade, and, depending on enrollment, each grade had four to seven classes, plus there was an addition on the back we called “the portables,” which housed fourth-grade classes. The shooter never got past the first three first-grade classrooms he encountered when he turned left to the corridor just past the main office. Most of the people in school that day were nowhere near that sliver of hallway where the shootings took place. Many may never have even heard the sound of the gunshots, or the horror of how powerful they were.