welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host the sandy hook elementary school shooting took place december fourteenth two thousand and twelve in newtown connecticut when twenty year old adam lan shot twenty children and six adult staff members prior to leaving for the school he shot and killed his mother in their newtown home and when the first responders arrived he shot and killed himself my guest today is scarlett lewis and she is the mother of six year old jessie lewis who was shot and killed that day most of us could understand if scarlett spent the rest of her life consumed by grief and anger as a matter of fact i first told her i was almost afraid to talk to her because i wasn't sure i even wanted to touch the fringe of that kind of pain and yet scarlett has chosen the road less traveled and she is here today to talk about that scarlet welcome and thank you so much for being here and for being willing to have this conversation which i'm sure in some ways might get a little easier but never without its challenges so i appreciate the fact that you're see here so let let's start with what happened that day and then what came out of that in terms of the jesse lewis choose love you know december fourteenth two thousand and twelve started like any other day you were running around on a single mom have two boys get the time jessie he was six and my older son g t scuse me who is twelve so we're you know normal day getting up and running around in the morning late  work and then you heard this news i heard that there'd been a shooting at a school in sandy hook and i was you know concerned but certainly not  panicked you know i just think that we all think nothing can ever happen to our children they're in school and school is supposed to be a safe haven they are where they're supposed to be we are where we're supposed to be and and so the so people kept coming up in saying i you know it's definitely in the school and i started to get a little bit more concerned i was on the phone with his father his father had also driven an hour away and less driving back and i thought you know what i should just probably go if it's that it that just his dad would be picking him up because we had heard that all the children were evacuated and so i was ok with him picking him up but i thought you know what maybe i should go and might want you know they were searching nearby homes it was like oh yes and and so the day wore on and there were a big a huge group of us obviously you know all the family members of these these kids and educators that were missing and you just you just you just don't think you just know it just never entered my head until maybe i don't know several hours later that you know when they started they started asking me about you identifying mark son jesse did i remember when we it it just kind of you know the world knew before we knew what had happened and there's a lot of anger around now that i i thought it was kind of a less like mind of started coming to the realization of my home which was you know just devastated that you know my son might not come yeah so eventually i think i think around four o'clock in the afternoon when we were sitting actually at my mom's and she answered the door and it wasn't until i don't know several weeks later that i found out about that is that that was the official you know i knew i knew towards the end of the day you know i i'm sure every parent out there hearing this can't even start to imagine what that must have been like and i assume that the reality of it hits in stages because there's one there's the information he's gone but then what does that actually mean and then how do how does my life look now and then i know he can't be gone so in that process tell me about the chalkboard yeah well that it is though it is a lengthy process because your human mind can calculate immediately gone forever mean it's that to me it took me a while to come to that come to those terms and obviously accepting of that but i went back to my mom's house she lives across town and of life filled our house i could not imagine ever going back there without that you know the whiteness but the following week i did have to go back to get it's close for the funeral because of course somebody  kitchen and noticed that he had written words on the chalkboard nurturing healing love and i was absolutely floored because you know i just knew that that was not in was going to honor jesse i knew that i had to get citizenship i knew that i had to live my life in service within the first couple of weeks i knew that i couldn't go back to any part of my solutions and and we kind of agreed that what's the most important thing in your life more important than moving water and anything else it's love it's to love and be loved and and just is the message we dissected it and broke apart the meaning of each word knowing that it was a prophetic message and we realize that because i want to also you know we're going to show a picture of the message but it was written in the writing of a six year old phonetically so this is not something some adult came in and put in that that that message without that message it's hard to imagine where you would have gone with that grief  so i just wanted to ask you so you know clearly grief doesn't just disappear or anger doesn't just disappear because you saw this message you know so what's really incredible is like f the whole dissecting it and looking at it and saying like what does that mean and what do we do with this but what did you do with the grief and the anger that came wafting back in the how did you get to the point where you actually could forgive the shooter well i continue to grieve just so you know i think you know i will probably grieve the loss of jesse for the rest of my life i grieve every day i cry every day and i miss him terribly but as far as the anger goes i really had this sense very early on that i had i i was able to have compassion for the shooter i know that sounds crazy but i just instinctively knew that he had slipped through the cracks i knew that someone that and i did come to find out later on that he absolutely did that if you look at his timeline that he cried out for help many times and in the way that  a child does they don't raise their handing and say i'm having malicious thoughts i need to see it's like high interest you know they act out and there were red flags through out adam lanza's life for instance when he was in fifth grade and he attended sandy hook elementary he wrote a book called the book of granny he had found and he was bringing it to the elementary school south and it was about which they came to sandy hook elementary with a broomstick and the handle of the broom stick opened at the top and became a semiautomatic weapon and she murdered children with it so i mean when when someone when a child does something like that that's a cry for help right or or it needs to be addressed and that was never addressed and that was just one out of a whole series  of things that happened that you know i feel like i feel like he maybe felt ignored and and what is the worse thing you can do to another human being and that is in my opinion ignore them they don't exist and i think that we're seeing got quite a bit with the active shooters  school related shooting her week in our country since sandy i'm not sure what the final count is it's well over one hundred forty and and i think that you're seeing that because these these i i want to hurt myself i want to hurt other people look i'm planning on hurting other all and then finally when not when no one intervenes and they feel ignored i think they ultimately think look i'm going to do and i i still feel anger at times and not just adam lanza but at you know people that take advantage of the tragedy it's incredible what happens following a tragedy you know you would never it was mindblowing you would never you could never anticipate or imagine it but were you ostracized at all for choosing this point of view i'm not sure that my message of forgiveness is personally choosing forgiveness because it is the choice was to save my life and you know i did not i consciously decided that i did not want to become another victim to continue our life we're going to have a good life we're we're going to we're just going to deal with this in the best way possible we're going to choose how we respond to this situation and you know it's totally extraordinary and yet it makes sense and the thing that i wanted to ask you in the time we had left because you actually created the jesse lewis choose love foundation and i it seems to me that one of your goals is to actually create curriculums in schools to teach that kind of thinking is that correct it is correct  you know my goal is to make sure that every child has access to social and emotional learning that's the learning about how to self regulate your emotions it's learning life skills  learning communication and how to get along with others and i i believe that if adam lanza had had access to some learning this whole tragedy when that happens and i believe that that is you know beyond gun control beyond all the other issues everything's helpful but i believe the or or foundation issue is that kids need to learn to choose love and it is a choice yeah no matter how big you and so we are in the finishing stages of creating and absolutely free to choose love enrichment program that we're going to offer on line and  and that will be fulfilling our mission of making sure that every child has access to this life changing curriculum that's amazing yes and you know when you keep saying choose i mean that's the key word there mostly we don't think we have a choice in how we feel or how we deal with what we feel and to be able to teach that and empower children and adults to do that can alter the world i wanted to ask you about your other son because he has done some extraordinary things since then as well so j t was twelve at the time and he had an incredible experience where of group of orphan genocide survivors from rwanda reached out to him and share their experience remember when something like that happens you don't have a lot of people who've been through the same situation so you know people are telling you you're going to be ok but they really have no legitimacy these people in our eyes have legitimacy they've been through something worse they've gotten through the other side and they were willing to share their story and tell us how they did that and so they just really connected with j t and gave him the he be healing equation that that they had for getting through watching the murder of their families and attempted murder on themselves and orphanages and and how they turned this whole thing around to finding meaning in the suffering and using it to help other people and after that and amazingly enough their healing raised by the way was the exact same formula that justin had left on our kitchen chalkboard it's it's gratitude plus forgiveness plus compassion and that's choosing love and that's exactly how they got through there's an afterwards this is the quote that i'll never forget he said those kids reached out to me in love and i'm going to reach back out to them and i'm going to raise money for them to go to university because that was not an option for them with their current lifestyle and he went back to school he actually always where h great example having example of shit yes we've got one minute left and i want you to tell us about your book oh thank you so i wrote a book i knew that my mission in life would be to spread hope for the first six months and and it's it's really i have gotten a lot of feedback from all around the world and it's just really helped a lot of people and i'm so thankful for that opportunity then i did want to say something about choice if i could boil my whole experience down to one word it would be choice because we we can choose how we respond in every situation situation really and we can choose to forgive and you can use me as perspective and we can choose to find if we if we have the courage to sit with our suffering and not fear it we can find meaning in our suffering and we get to help other people and that's really the only way that i know how to live life now happily scarlet thank you so much i invite people to check out your website check out the book we can all benefit from the masses whether we've experienced something like this and so dramatically tragic or not so i so appreciate what you're doing and yeah and i think that you are making and you and your son are making a huge difference and of course and jesse is the source so thank you so much for being here thank you my name is natasha sherman thank you for