* * *
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 by citizens and lawmakers around the country—to prevent more massacres by passing basic, sensible laws concerning how guns were sold.
I watched him step forward, knowing that I myself wasn’t ready. In nearly four years as First Lady, I had consoled often. I’d prayed with people whose homes had been shredded by a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, huge swaths of the town turned to matchsticks in an instant. I’d put my arms around men, women, and children who’d lost loved ones to war in Afghanistan, to an extremist who’d shot up an Army base in Texas, and to violence on street corners near their own homes. In the previous four months, I’d paid visits to people who’d survived mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and inside a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. It was devastating, every time. I’d tried always to bring the most calm and open part of myself to these meetings, to lend my own strength by being caring and present, sitting quietly on the riverbed of other people’s pain. But two days after the shooting at Sandy Hook, when Barack traveled to Newtown to speak at a prayer vigil being held for the victims, I couldn’t bring myself to join him. I was so shaken by it that I had no strength available to lend. I’d been First Lady for almost four years, and there had been too much killing already—too many senseless preventable deaths and too little action. I wasn’t sure what comfort I could ever give to someone whose six-year-old had been gunned down at school.
Instead, like a lot of parents, I clung to my children, my fear and love intertwined. It was nearly Christmas, and Sasha was among a group of local children selected to join the Moscow Ballet for two performances of The Nutcracker, both happening on the same day as the vigil in Newtown. Barack managed to slip into a back row and watch the dress rehearsal before leaving for Connecticut. I went to the evening show.
The ballet was as beautiful and otherworldly as any recounting of that story ever is, with its prince in a moonlit forest and its swirling pageantry of sweets. Sasha played a mouse, dressed in a black leotard with fuzzy ears and a tail, performing her part while an ornate sleigh drifted through the swelling orchestral music and showers of glittering fake snow. My eyes never left her. My whole being was grateful for her. Sasha stood bright-eyed onstage, looking at first like she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she found the whole scene dazzling and unreal. Which of course it was. But she was young enough still that she could give herself over to it, at least for the moment, allowing herself to move through this heaven where nobody spoke and everyone danced, and a holiday was always just about to arrive.
* * *
Bear with me here, because this doesn’t necessarily get easier. It would be one thing if America were a simple place with a simple story. If I could narrate my part in it only through the lens of what was orderly and sweet. If there were no steps backward. And if every sadness, when it came, turned out at least to be redemptive in the end.
But that’s not America, and it’s not me, either. I’m not going to try to bend this into any kind of perfect shape.
Barack’s second term would prove to be easier in many ways than his first. We’d learned so much in four years, putting the right people into place around us, building systems that generally worked. We knew enough now to avoid some of the inefficiencies and small mistakes that had been made the first time around, beginning on Inauguration Day in January 2013, when I requested that the viewing stand for the parade be fully heated this time so our feet wouldn’t freeze. In an attempt to conserve our energy, we hosted only two inaugural balls that night, as opposed to the ten we’d gone to in 2009. We had four years still to go, and if I’d learned anything, it was to relax and try to pace myself.