Twenty children and 6 teachers lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut—including the shooter and his mother, the number stands at twenty-eight. In this excerpt from grief counselor Meg Spinella's blog, Noah's Ark Now, she explains that although we grieve deeply when faced with such senseless and sudden loss, we don't have to feel powerless.
In the significant losses in my life, the death of my father and my brother, I had no opportunity for anticipatory grief. My father died suddenly of a heart attack one Christmas Eve. My brother died of an asthma attack. At 74 and 52 respectively, both died prematurely by today’s standards of life expectancy. While their deaths were sudden, they were not marked by violence.
The recent events in Tucson, the murder of six people and the wounding of 14 others, sent shock waves of grief through that community and beyond. I felt, and sometimes still feel, traumatized by the deaths in my family though they were attributed to natural causes. Sudden death by unnatural causes, like the all too frequent random gun violence in America, is a wounding of a greater magnitude. Sadly, I’m personally acquainted with a number of…
