Opinion | How is an Annunciation parent to write a Christmas card?

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I haven’t been able to make our Christmas card this year. If I’m being honest, it is never my favorite thing to do — one more task in a busy season. I do love receiving holiday cards, which is why I try to do them myself. I tape them up on our built-in cabinets, first telling my kids who is in the photos, giving faces and stories to names of extended relatives or friends that are scattered around the globe. It makes me feel closer to my community to feel that these relationships are with us as we finish a year and begin anew.

This year’s card-making feels particularly hard because my son is a second-grader at Annunciation School in Minneapolis. He survived the shooting that happened at school on Aug. 27, while he and the entire school community were gathered together at Mass to celebrate the start of a new school year.

Those sentences are still hard to write more than three months later. My breath catches in my throat — in that space between your collarbones — and I can feel a dull pressure behind my right eye. In a more cerebral way, I don’t like the wording of it. Words don’t quite capture what happened or what is still happening in our lives. I’ve tried on different language in an effort to solve this: survived, experienced, witnessed … nothing feels right and perhaps it is because none of this is right. The truth of what happened is that an adult legally purchased weapons of war, explicitly designed to cause maximum harm, with the plan to kill children — my children and children that I know. My son’s school was chosen for this horrific act of violence because the shooter had some familiarity with its schedule and, ultimately, because it is one of the most heinous things you can imagine. More than 300 children and approximately 50 adults were gathered in one room, with no protection and no warning. It is abject horror.

How does one write this in their Christmas card? Often there is an effort to wrap a nice bow on the year; we took these trips, the kids are in these activities, looking forward to a joyful new year! There is an attempt to do this in articles and stories about the shooting as well; the community has come together, we’re being uplifted by so many, there were and continue to be so many helpers. All of this is true. I do feel an outpouring of connection and love. And, yet. This connection and love sit alongside the reality that someone tried to murder hundreds of children who are now working to make sense of that experience in their families and school, and the even starker reality that two families don’t get the chance to do that.

I’ve spent 24 years intellectualizing and trying to make sense of grief, loss and trauma. I’ve acquired numerous degrees in an attempt to find meaning in loss and in search of an antidote, or at least a salve, to the distress and pain that can follow a traumatic event. I literally have 143 pages of a nearly finished dissertation examining the relationship between public narrative and traumatic stress. I have so much to say, and it definitely doesn’t fit on the back of a Christmas card.

This was a terrible thing, and it isn’t over. The complexity of holding gratitude and pain is overwhelming. I get the chance to hold my child and to be annoyed with him when he won’t put his shoes on to get out the door. This is a chance that other families don’t get to share in.

I keep replaying a memory in my head from this past summer when my son and daughter put on a magic show in the backyard — it was an ordinary day, and one that I may or may not have remembered otherwise — my son was so joyful and so innocent with his little top hat and cape. They did this fantastic trick where his sister disappeared in the hammock; the timing was impeccable and brought genuine awe and laughter. I’ve been thinking about it because I don’t know when or if he will ever access that innocence again. I can see it in his eyes, a change, a knowing of darkness in the world that he didn’t have before. His sister has been asking him for tips on how to stay safe if she is shot at when she goes to kindergarten next year. Not how to find her classroom, how to not be shot.

I try to access my professional knowledge and training when confronted with these questions. When I succeed in that, I know that we will be OK. I know that with time and intention, my kids can regain a sense of safety and that, while this has changed us forever, they can develop skills to manage distress and, one day, this won’t be at the center of their every day. I have also been thinking about an Elie Wiesel quote: It is not that I cannot explain that you will not understand, it is that you will not understand that I cannot explain.

My hope for the new year is that we each try a little harder to know and understand the stories and experiences of others, and that we can do more to connect and grow and challenge ourselves to witness and participate with open hearts.

So, I guess this is what I want to say in my Christmas card:

The children and the staff of Annunciation are so brave and courageous. They are showing up every day in the messy and the beautiful and the hard.

What we say matters; narrative helps all of us make sense of the world and our own experiences. This is true on an individual level and a societal level. Narrative is not fixed.

We choose this reality. We can choose a better one. While we cannot choose the actions of others, we do choose the world that we collectively create. Do what you can to contribute to the world you want to be in.

With love and hope for a more connected and safer world.