Community Is My Oxygen

On violence, memorials, and moving forward.

(content warning: discussions of mass shootings and homophobic violence)

Every November, my aunt and uncle host Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family at their home in Newtown, CT. I had a long commute this year (all the way from Amherst, MA) so I left town extremely early to beat the holiday traffic. Halfway into my drive I looked at my ETA and realized that I had drastically overestimated how bad the traffic would be, and that I’d be arriving in Newtown about an hour earlier than I needed to.

I started wondering if it would be gouache to arrive that early and what I could do to kill time. Surprise my UConn friends? No, Storrs would be too big of a detour. Go shopping somewhere? Nah, money’s tight right now. (plz subscribe, btw, tyvm)

Then, as two wires got crossed on my brain—one that was thinking about Things To Do in Newtown, CT and one that had been thinking about the recent Club Q shooting in Colorado—I realized something. I had never visited Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The memorial built on a clearing of woods near Sandy Hook Elementary School, completed in August 2022 and opened to the public on November 13th, 2022.