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Newtown (Connecticut), Jan. 6: At least five of the children who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School played at a gymnastics centre called the Tumble Jungle. So, soon after the shootings, a staff member brought a bedsheet from her house, painted the words “Our Angels, Never Forgotten” on it, and she and her co-workers draped it over the sign in the front window.
It was one of dozens of such heartfelt memorials that appeared here on roadsides, in yards and on storefronts in the days after the shootings. Today, the bedsheet is still there, rippling in the wind like a flag of mourning, which in every sense it is.
“We lost so many kids close to us,” said Brandy Nezvesky, 18, the manager of Tumble Jungle. “It’s going to be a big decision for all of us to take it down.”
Newtown remains a town suffocating in grief after the school massacre on December 14 that killed 20 first graders and six adult staff members. Now, it is wrestling with what to do with all those well-meaning memorials. The sheet in front of the Tumble Jungle remains; others have disappeared, some swept up by the town in the middle of the night.
It is a daunting question: when do public displays of sorrow and sympathy become barriers to moving on, especially for the victims’ families who drive past them?
The town has been so inundated with these and other acts of sympathy that, at one point, officials implored other communities to stop sending gifts of toys and other goods and to give them to their own charities in the name of the Sandy Hook victims.
“That’s what happens in disasters like this, especially on a scale like this,” said John Eastwood, the pastor of Calvary Chapel in nearby Southbury, who was a chaplain with the Red Cross at ground zero after 9/11.
The question of how long is too long to let these temporary memorials stand has become all too familiar in sites like Columbine and Virginia Tech, where gunmen have gone on deadly rampages.
Patricia Llodra, a Newtown official, made the painful decision for many herself when she ordered the public works department two weeks after the shooting to remove many of the most elaborate memorials.
To be removed were the vast gardens of grief — including rows of decorated Christmas trees topped with silken angels, green and white balloons (the school’s colours), sacrificial candles and deeply personal items like old dolls and sports trophies — that had accumulated outside the firehouse near the school and in the centre of Sandy Hook.
Before doing so, Llodra alerted members of the entire community by phone, warning them of the pending removal. Organic material like flowers and trees, she told them, would be processed into “sacred soil” to use in the foundation of a future memorial.
The teddy bears and other non-organic items would be turned into bricks and other building materials for the tribute.
Llodra also wrote a letter to the victims’ families, inviting them to spend private time at the sites and to take any items they wished for personal keepsakes. On December 28, the police closed the roads around the memorials for two hours. That night, after most of the town had gone to bed, employees from the public works department collected all the material, placed it in containers and took it to the department’s warehouse.
Llodra has invited everyone to take their memorials to the department for inclusion in the permanent memorial. “There’s no road map for this,” Llodra said. “So I have to make the decisions based on what my heart tells me is right and what my head says is possible.”
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