Yvonne Cech and Diana Perri Haneski met 36 years ago while working at a Connecticut radio station. They married men they met at the station and moved hundreds of miles apart, but their lives appeared to continue in sync. They twice gave birth within weeks of one another. They each earned a master’s degree from the same university.
Cech became a librarian at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Haneski became a librarian at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
And now, each has survived a mass shooting at her school. Last week in Florida, Haneski used lessons she had learned from Cech’s experience in 2012.
That is the start of a remarkable and moving article in today’s Washington Post by Katie Zezima, fully titled ‘The club no one wants to join.’ Mass shooting survivors find solace in one another.
It starts with the relationship of these two long-time friends, both touched by unspeakable tragedy, with Haneski having internalized the lessons fo the experience of Cech and applying it on Valentine’s day.
It also talks about the wider network of survivors who reach out to the newest “members” of the club.
Those of us who have watched tv have heard the articulate teenagers and a few of the adults from Stoneman Douglas. We may also have heard survivors of other massacres if we watched the President’s “Listening Session.”
I am going to strongly suggest you will want to read this article, and to share it with others.
Let me also offer just a few more snips to illustrate why, first this
With the growing list of mass shootings in America, survivors have taken it upon themselves to connect. They offer support that only someone who has huddled in a closet while a gunman lurked outside, or buried a murdered child, can provide. They find one another via formal and informal networks, social media and, as their ranks grow, by unlucky coincidence, such as Cech and Haneski’s friendship.
and then this
After Newtown, Cech and others who worked at Sandy Hook met with teachers from Colorado’s Columbine High School, where a 1999 shooting that killed 13 students ushered in the modern era of mass school shootings and security lockdowns. A group from an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pa., where a gunman killed five people in 2006, took a bus to Newtown to meet with survivors.
This is a club that should NOT be growing its membership. It includes survivors of Charleston and of Aurora. Others who have experiences like this include Las Vegas, Virginia Tech, the Washington Navy Yard, and more.
Too many names linked together by the kind of tragedy that is all too frequent in America, in schools and elsewhere, and incredibly rare elsewhere outside of war zones.
Perhaps these survivors, combining their voices with the students, teachers and families from Stoneman Douglas, can begin to change America’s attitudes on guns. Raising the age for long guns, hardening schools into prison-like facilities, making it easier to secure weapons from mentally disturbed or even securing them might eliminate SOME shootings but will not solve the underlying issues
I want you to read the whole article. Then the final paragraph will really hit home.
Here it is:
“People might think this is unusual or atypical. This is going to happen more and more and more unless we do something to change it,” Cech said, noting that she wishes Haneski never had to use the knowledge gained from Sandy Hook. “While I’m glad that Diana had that information in her mind and it’s useful to her, I’m angry as hell she had to use that information.”