On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty-six people. Twenty of them were first graders. I have a hard time remembering that number. I have to look it up every time I mention it. Sometimes I remember it as seventeen, sometimes as four hundred, sometimes as infinite. Infinite bodies, infinite death, infinite pain.

I remember everything else about that day, though: my twin daughters, one home sick from kindergarten and the other at school, well and unknowing. I remember President Obama, I remember weeping with him, I remember leaning against a door frame in my home and praying it would hold me. I remember the parents on TV, shattered. I remember picking my daughter up from school and being able to immediately recognize those parents still on the other side of the divide: the unknowing.

A dividing line. A chasm. That’s what Sandy Hook became for me and for so many others in this country. And once you crossed the line between before and after, once you , there was no turning back. The before became unreachable. I could never