was coming in our direction, maybe faster than we knew.
* * *
Five weeks later, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started killing children.
I had just finished giving a short speech across the street from the White House and was scheduled to then go visit a children’s hospital when Tina pulled me aside to tell me what had happened. While I’d been speaking, she and several others had seen the headlines start to come up on their phones. They’d sat there trying to hide their emotions as I wrapped up my remarks.
The news Tina gave me was so horrifying and sad I could barely process what she was saying.
She mentioned she’d been in touch with the West Wing. Barack was in the Oval Office by himself. “He’s asking for you to come,” she said. “Right away.”
My husband needed me. This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort. Usually, work was work and home was home, but for us, as for many people, the tragedy in Newtown shattered every window and blew down every fence. When I walked into the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was nothing to say. No words.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the president sees almost everything, or is at least privy to basically any available information related to the country’s well-being. Being a fact guy, Barack always asked for more rather than less. He tried to gather both the widest and the most close-up view of every situation, even when it was bad, so that he could offer a truly informed response. As he saw it, it was part of his responsibility, what he’d been elected to do—to look rather than look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt ready to fall down.
Which is to say that by the time I found him, he’d been briefed in detail on the graphic, horrid crime scene at Sandy Hook. He’d heard about blood pooled on the floors of classrooms and the bodies of twenty first graders and six educators torn apart by a semiautomatic rifle. His shock and grief would never compare with that of the first responders who’d rushed in to secure the building and evacuate survivors from the carnage. It was nothing next to that of the parents who endured an interminable wait in the chilly air outside the building, praying that they’d see their child’s face again. And it was nothing at all next to those whose wait would be in vain.
But still, those images were seared permanently into his psyche. I could see in his eyes how broken they’d left him, what this had done already to his faith. He started to describe it to me but then stopped, realizing it was better to spare me the extra pain.
Like me, Barack loved children in a deep and genuine way. Beyond being a doting father, he regularly brought kids into the Oval Office to show them around. He asked to hold babies. He lit up anytime he got to visit a school science fair or a youth sporting event. The previous winter, he’d added a whole new level of delight to his existence when he started volunteering as an assistant coach for the Vipers, Sasha’s middle school basketball team.
The proximity of children made everything lighter for him. He knew as well as anyone the promise lost with those twenty young lives.
Staying upright after Newtown was probably the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. When Malia and Sasha came home from school later that day, Barack and I met them in the residence and hugged them tight, trying to mask the urgency of our need just to touch them. It was hard to know what to say or not say to our girls about the shooting. Parents all around the country, we knew, were grappling with the same thing.
Later that day, Barack held a press conference downstairs, trying to put together words that might add up to something like solace. He wiped away tears as news cameras clicked furiously around him, understanding that truly there was no solace to be had. The best he could do was to offer his resolve—something he assumed would also get taken up