12 Years Later, Two Different Tales of Grief for Sandy Hook Parents

On the night of his daughter’s death, Robbie Parker remembered the Christmas cards. Back at home, hours after his 6-year-old had been murdered in her classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary, he thought about the portrait: he and his wife Alissa, posing with their three little girls, Madeline, Samantha, and Emilie. Alissa had mailed all the cards the day before.

Amid the shock and chaos, Robbie couldn’t stand the thought of their friends and family opening the envelopes and seeing Emilie, his deceased first grader. He didn’t want to inflict his suffering on anyone. That was how he operated after the shooting: focus on others, never on himself. “I felt so hollow,” Parker told me last week, reflecting on that first Christmas after Emilie died. “And I felt like a fraud to my kids, because I was feeling so much pain.”

He began living each day on high alert. In addition to losing his daughter, Parker became a target of Alex Jones and other conspiracists, who spent years peddling the lie that the pile of bodies inside Sandy Hook wasn’t real; that Parker and others were crisis actors, that Emilie and her friends hadn’t been slaughtered by a gunman.

Last year, some 2,000 miles away from Newtown, Connecticut, Parker saw his 2012 Christmas card hanging on the side of a refrigerator. He was in Utah, where he and Alissa grew up, and he was chatting with the mom of an old high-school friend. As he stood in her kitchen, he could hardly believe that someone outside his family had kept that photo for so long—and that they had chosen to display it. “Sandy Hook is such a deep, personal thing for me,” he said. “I really lacked an understanding of how strongly it touched other people.”

[Read: What it feels like to lose your child in a mass shooting]

I recently spoke with Parker and another Sandy Hook parent, Scarlett Lewis, about how they made sense of what happened, and how their grief has changed over time. Lewis told me that, inspired by her religious faith, she quickly forgave the shooter, Adam Lanza, and was determined to celebrate her son Jesse’s life through community advocacy. For Parker, the process was slower and more complicated. After years of living in fear, he eventually found his strength in standing up directly to Jones and bonding with other Sandy Hook parents in court. Parker and Lewis have walked different paths, but, 12 years after the worst day of their lives, they both refuse to let themselves be casualties of this tragedy.

Like Emilie Parker, Jesse Lewis was 6 years old when he was killed at Sandy Hook. All these years later, his mother remains passionate and emphatic when speaking about her son. Scarlett was out driving with her own mom when she and I spoke by phone earlier this week. She told me that she takes responsibility for what happened to Jesse. “It was in his school, in my community,” she said. This attitude has surprised people, including her mother. “I’m not saying it’s my fault,” Lewis added. “I’m saying I take my part of the responsibility for what goes on in my community.”

Lewis never knows how she’s going to feel when she wakes up on December 14. Most years, her mom will go out and buy a cake and balloons to mark the day. From the beginning, Lewis has tried to remember her son in joyful ways. Before Jesse’s funeral, she asked her mom to pick up a case of champagne. “It’s not that I’m not sad every day, because I am. It’s not that I don’t cry, because I do,” she told me. “I honor the feelings that I have, but my focus, I want to be on celebration.”

Her particular path toward peace and acceptance has been rooted in the practice of mercy. She described to me how she made the conscious choice to forgive Lanza shortly after the massacre.

“There are only two kinds of people in the world,” she said: good people, and “good people in pain.” This became her life philosophy, inspired by her faith in God. “I think we need to give love to those we feel deserve it the least,” she said. She told me that she feels genuine compassion for Lanza, who reportedly had untreated mental illness and developmental disabilities. “Adam must have been in a tremendous amount of pain,” she said. She realized she could go about the rest of her life angry, or she could lean into love. Once choice seemed easier. The other choice seemed healthier.

Like Parker, Lewis knew that her actions after Newtown would affect her family members, particularly Jesse’s brother, who was 12 years old at the time of the shooting. “I really kind of thought about how I wanted him to handle difficulty, and then I was that person,” she said. Lewis recognized that pain was inevitable, but that suffering could be a choice.

Living this way requires constant, daily reminders. “Obviously, I would never have chosen to have my son murdered,” she said. “However, I can choose how I respond—that’s how I take my personal power back.”

Lewis was not one of the plaintiffs in the nearly $1 billion Connecticut lawsuit against Jones, but she and Jesse’s father successfully sued him in a separate case in Texas and were awarded $49 million. She told me that she was not out to “take down” Infowars, his company, or to destroy Jones himself. He, too, she feels, is someone worthy of her compassion and forgiveness. As the 12th anniversary of Sandy Hook arrives, Jones, somehow, is still inescapable. Earlier this week, a judge blocked the sale of Infowars to The Onion, which had coordinated its bid with the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and a collection of Newtown parents.

In Lewis’s view, a horrific act such as mass murder is the end result of a much larger and longer-term societal problem. While some Sandy Hook parents have focused their energy on trying to reform gun laws, Lewis has dedicated the past decade-plus of her life to addressing what she calls the “grievance end” of the pathway to violence. Her campaign, Choose Love, aims to promote character development in schools.

“We’re kind of wired to be angry and blame somebody else: Ah, it’s those guns. It’s the people that don’t vote for gun control. It’s your fault,” she said. “It has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with choosing love and doing the right thing for our kids, providing for their needs—what they need right now—and that is the essential life skills to deal with the complications and complexities of life today, and the courage to face the pain, learn from it, grow through it, and be strengthened by it.”

[Read: My life since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting: Scarlett Lewis’s story]

Lewis told me she refuses to fault others for what happened to her son. “When you blame other people, you give your personal power away, and you’re a victim,” she said. “And I did not want to be a victim. I did not want to be another victim of Adam Lanza.”

Parker told me that, for a while after the shooting, he struggled to process his new reality. His daughter was dead and strangers were harassing him, claiming he was complicit in an elaborate hoax. Eventually, he began typing out his feelings. The original document wasn’t meant for public consumption, but as he began sending it to friends, they encouraged him to share it widely. Last month, he published A Father’s Fight: Taking On Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook. For Parker, completing the project was cathartic. He viscerally explores the layers of Emilie’s death, Jones’s lies, and his grief. “My story is so bizarre, right? Like, it’s unfathomable,” he said. “People don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I’m writing the book going, Did this all really happen to me?”

Emilie would have turned 18 this year. Parker told me that the anniversaries have gotten harder, not easier. He wonders what she would be like now—a young woman off to college, someone old enough to vote. He told me he’s struggling to figure out how he can keep honoring his daughter’s spirit in a way that feels true to who she’d actually be today, rather than freezing her in time as a little girl.

Emilie’s sisters, Madeline and Samantha, are now 16 and 15 years old. Perhaps Parker’s toughest challenge has been raising them while traumatized. “I kind of thought that this moment would turn me into the best dad ever, and I’m laughing at just how naive I was,” he said. For a while, he parented from a place of anger and fear. He was worried that his daughters would be harmed like their sister, or that they’d be exposed to the lies and harassment of Jones and other conspiracists.

The family moved away from Newtown. Parker would often be out in public and think that someone was looking at him strangely, and instinctively position his body in front of his kids to protect them. “I knew that it was changing me as a person,” he said. “And I didn’t know where it was going to go.” He and his wife objected, for instance, when their daughters went to post photos from school activities on social media. “We didn’t want people to make those connections, and figure out what school they were at, and triangulate where we were,” Parker said. Even today, his daughters tend to hide their faces in pictures.

Parker’s decision to join the Connecticut lawsuit against Jones in 2018—to fight back against his tormenter—helped steer him toward a place of peace. As he took the stand to testify, he felt that he was finally able to reclaim his power from Jones.

“I thought things were being taken from me. Emilie was killed. Alex Jones was taking a lot from me. And I realized at one point that I had been giving this up because I wasn’t fighting back,” he said. “It was never his to begin with. I essentially let him have it.” The first day he saw Jones walk into the courtroom, he was shocked. “He’s really just a very sad, pathetic, shriveled man,” Parker said. “I felt pity for him, actually, when I saw him, and I was shocked and surprised that that’s the emotion that came up for me. It went away when he started talking.”

Sitting in court alongside other Sandy Hook parents also gave him strength and courage. “They’re the only people that get you on a very, very deep level,” he said. “But then you also realize, I don’t know these people at all. I didn’t know any of these families before the shooting; we had only lived in Sandy Hook for eight months. Going through the trial and being able to spend time with them every single day and eating lunch with them during the lunch break—I finally got to know who they were.” He now keeps the other Sandy Hook kids’ birthdays on his calendar and might text a fellow dad something as simple as a heart emoji when that day arrives.

It’s the act of acknowledgment, instead of suppression, that he believes has allowed him to prioritize essential truths: His daughter was real, her death was real, his pain is real, and his gradual healing has also been real. “I’m 42 now. She’s teaching me 12 years after she died how I can connect to my emotion and share it with somebody,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing.”