As I write, people in Connecticut are anxiously awaiting confirmation from the police of the identities of those who have died in the massacre at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School yesterday. But as one woman interviewed on the news said, even if it’s not someone you know, it is another child, or another adult.
These stories take me back to one Sunday in April 1996, and the queue to use the only functioning telephone at Port Arthur, Tasmania. A group of maybe one or two hundred of us had spent the afternoon hanging around the hotel dining room in shock, drinking the pumpkin soup and eating the sandwiches the staff provided, being refused information from the police, until the evening news came on the TV. The police tried at that point to turn off the television, until loud protests overruled them. We watched in stunned horror as we started to realise the extent of the massacre. Ten, twelve, twenty, the estimates of the dead continued to rise throughout the evening. Reports included the details that a three year old child was amongst the dead. My own small son, who was two and a half, had been playing with a younger child whose father we knew was dead.
I suddenly realised that I’d told my work colleagues we were heading to Port Arthur, and that they would by now have heard the news. I joined the lengthy queue for the phone. The coin holder was full, so it was only possible to ring reversed charges. People made short calls back home to relatives and friends, then moved away to let the next person call. I had no address book on me, but one of my colleagues had a memorable home phone number so I rang her. I heard the operator say to her daughter, ‘Would you accept a reversed charge call from Paula Boddington?’ I can remember worrying that they might not be willing to pay for the call. But of course immediately I could hear her mother shout, ‘Yes yes’ and grab the phone. ‘We’re all okay’, I said. Then what she said next chilled my blood, and does so every time I remember it.
‘Thank God, thank God’ she said, ‘We heard on the news that a three year old had been killed and I just assumed the worst that you were all dead, I feared that it was Reuben. Thank God.’
I could not reply. I was surrounded by the stunned survivors of a shooting, which was at the time, and for many years to come, the world’s worst ever massacre by a single gun man. And the inevitable logic overwhelmed me: if the dead three year old was not my son, Reuben, it was some one else’s child. I could not deny I was glad my son was safe. But I could not say that I was glad he was. Because that would be like dealing out the hand of death to someone else.
God’s blessing on those who stand and wait to know, who has been taken, and who remains.