When Kids Don’t React to Tragedy
Never was Boston so grateful for a Monday: Back to work, back to school, back to routines, after a five-day ordeal shook the city and the world watched. Gone are most of the satellite trucks, the clusters of reporters and cameramen, the strands of law enforcement officers for every street on our normal path. By Wednesday, barricades and memorials for the victims of the April 15 bombings, bookending Boylston St., were moved and the street reopened. One week ago, my innocent concern was for the magnolias on Commonwealth Avenue, and whether they’d be at their showy peak when 23,000 marathoners rose up out of the underpass to greet the last six-tenths of their 26.2-mile race. Last year, the trees bloomed pink and white in March, and Patriots Day was really too hot for running. This past marathon morning, my children and I took a break from planting dozens of unpromising looking, dormant rhizomes in our yard, and before noon we walked over in the cool sunshine to see the first hour’s worth of finishers turn the corner onto Hereford Street. We stole some space between a police van and the fence. My little one got tired of watching, and I told the big sisters to not stay too long. They were practically standing on top of the exhaust from the van. I let out the leash a little that day and let the girls walk home on their own, for the first time for that particular route and distance. There were so many policemen around, what could happen? Racing against our own gardening fatigue, we dug dirt and forgot to track some friends’ progress, as we normally do, never returning to the course. When my daughter asked about the loud bangs, I attributed them to a lumbering truck. I gasped when I read the words “Boston bombing” for the first time that day, realizing how our city would be tied to a tragedy, as are other communities who must wear their own sad histories with words like “massacre” attached to their names. I cried when I heard the fatalities included an eight-year-old boy, as my own eight-year-old and her sisters watched their dad take my tears on his shoulder. Our family is part of school communities that actually had classes in fits and starts last week, while most children were on spring break. So on Patriots’ Day, we left the house after police started to command the streets to find an open store and buy some required supplies for school the next day. With the weight of tragedy on everyone’s minds, I felt a little guilty asking a policewoman some practical questions about […]