Sandy Hook Mother Still Finds Hope Through The Hurt

Dispatcher: “911, what’s the location of your emergency?”

Female Caller: “I think there’s somebody shooting in here. Sandy Hook School.”

“I prayed,” Jenny said. "Keep them safe. Bring them home.”

Dispatcher: “Do you see anything or hear anything more?”

Male Caller: “I keep hearing shooting. I keep hearing popping.”

“They routed us to the firehouse,” Jenny remembered. “I saw Freddy, and Freddy said, ‘I can't find Catherine. I can't find Catherine.’"

Dispatcher: “Get the sergeant. Get everyone you can down there…”

“I stood there as the children's names were called,” Monsignor Robert Weiss shared, “and the parents took them from the line, and then you looked along the back wall of the firehouse and you saw the parents whose children did not respond ‘here.’”

“Freddy and I were sitting there,” Jenny said. “And he had his head on my shoulder. And I just remember the weight of his head of like, ‘Wow.’ I knew in my gut that Catherine had died.”

“…The grieving town of Newtown, CT, is holding the first funerals today for victims of the school shooting that left 20 children and 6 adults dead…Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza carried out the deadly rampage before taking his own life…there are many questions – what if the shooter had no access to the guns…others say the real problem is our mental health system…this never should have happened. How could this happen?...There is evil. There is abundance of evil in this world and we have to confront it…”

“I miss her laugh,” Jenny shared. “I miss her bear hugs. She would crawl into bed early in the morning and I miss rolling over and seeing her face. There’s mornings where I roll over and think, ‘Oh, you’re still here.’ Animals were just her passion, tried and true. Whether they were furry or slimy, she loved them all. She'd be in the garden and she would be among the butterflies that would sort of swoop in. She would get a butterfly on her hand and she would whisper to them, ‘Tell all your friends that I’m kind.’"

Monsignor Weiss shared, “This question just kept being thrown at me, ‘Is this making you lose your faith in God?’ Because how do you explain this? You know? How do you explain a senseless act like this?”

"’How do we go on? How do we go on?’” Jenny said, “There was so much sadness, so much weight, so much pain. The quiet that ensued after Catherine died was just painful.”

Monsignor Weiss shared, “I knew I had to do something in this church. I came back here, it was two hours before the service and the church was already filled. People were just forming their own prayer circles. Some were just singing Christmas carols. It was very clear to all of us that light is not going to be overcome by darkness.”  

“The getting used to the new normal,” Jenny described, “it was hard. We would start to talk about Catherine and then someone would go, ‘I can't do this.’ We each had those moments. But in getting through that it drew us closer together; it forced us to depend more heavily on God. And somehow between 12/14 and the funeral and then putting Freddy back on the bus and sending him to school – in each of those moments I haven't had to worry about what to do. In so many days when I am just sad and I just miss Catherine, the sun comes through the kitchen and warms me like you would think that I had the heat on full blast. Just God reaching in and saying, ‘I'm here.’ He knows my disappointment and my heartache and that’s okay because God’s bigger than that.”

Jenny remembered, “We had written her obituary and had said, ‘In lieu of flowers, please donate to the animal center of Newtown.’ Within two or three weeks they had received over $100,000 in donations in Catherine's honor. They had shared that they would like to build a sanctuary, and as they described their vision, I saw Catherine, I felt Catherine. I knew in my heart that this was the road we need to take.”

“Every decision,” she continued, “we've made from design to programming, she's at the heart of it all. I feel like it's that place where heaven and earth connect, and I can be with Catherine and, oh, my gosh! What a gift! And to think that God would say, ‘Okay, this is where I need you to be.’ That he would entrust…all of the people that he's brought into the fold with such an awesome responsibility, that at the end of the day is reflective of our baby girl. Oh my gosh, what an honor.”

“I have come to an understanding that she was never mine,” Jenny shared. “She's God's. He’s brought her home. We’re here because we still have work to be done. He has a purpose for us, he has a purpose for Freddy. Freddy's journey's not done. Catherine's was. I can't be angry about that. Do I want more time with her? Yes! Absolutely, positively. What I wouldn't give for one more day. But I don't want to take heaven away from her, I don't. We rest in hope knowing that there will be a day when we'll see her again.”

“What do you have if you don’t have faith?” Monsignor Weiss shared, “You can get very disheartened, you can get very discouraged, you can give up, you can feel like ‘Why bother?’ We all have to reckon with that because we don't know at any moment what could happen. We have to be able to find some peace within ourselves. And I don't know a better place to find peace, than prayer.”

“When Catherine died,” Jenny described, “I felt like I was a faithful person. I wasn't even scratching the surface. There was a time when prayer was reserved for when the house was clean and I had a few minutes and it was quiet and it was the setting that God would want. Like, ‘Okay, here I am and my house is perfect and I'm dressed, and aren't you happy with me?’ Where now it's a constant dialogue – it's ‘Open my eyes to see you. Open my ears to hear you, and give me the courage, dear God, to do what I’m supposed to do today.’"

“We were asked to carry a huge cross,” Monsignor Weiss asked, “And what are we going to show the world? Are we going to fall on our knees in weakness? Are we going to be like Christ and get up again? It's still hard to drive down that road. It's still hard. But the lessons and the stories and the incredible gifts that these little children at 6 and 7 left the world, you realize you have to go on.”

Jenny said, “The days when I’m like, ‘Oh, this is too much.’ I think of her leaning over the counter determined that she was going to write her name perfectly. I only hope that we walk with such grace and poise and leave the legacy that she has left us.”