A friend of mine sent an email earlier this week about Nancy Lanza and it really resonated with me, so I wanted to share it with you. 

Does Nancy Lanza deserve to be forgotten? In talking about Newtown, the number for the toll I see most frequently is 26 _ the children and the teachers killed at Sandy Hook that day.

Obviously no one’s going to count Adam Lanza and his final, self-inflicted death. If anything, considering the amount of ammunition he had on him meant to kill other children, we’re all just so lucky he didn’t keep himself alive any longer.

But where does his first victim fit in? Yes, there have been stories about her, trying to figure out who she was, and really, why did she have so many guns? Especially in a house she shared with her troubled son? How much culpability does she have in what he did, since he used her guns to do it?

But along with all those questions, there is one undisputable fact _ he killed her. Adam Lanza shot his mother, four times, in the head. The person who loved him most in the world was the first to die at his hands, before he went and vented his rage or evil or whatever on children and adults who were strangers to him.

So where does she fit? I don’t think I heard her name said at the memorial service. In news stories, the paragraph talking about his first victim is farther down the page, away from the ones talking about the children or the teachers.

That makes me, I don’t know, sad? uncomfortable? conflicted? Because it feels like we’re saying her death doesn’t matter, that the blame we (justifiably? who knows?) put on her, for having the guns, for not keeping her troubled son from being able to harm others, is more worth noting than the horror of her passing, than the sadness and grief of the people who loved her and have lost her, that because we blame her, we don’t really care that she’s dead.

That said, I don’t know where I would put her. It also feels a little profane to link her with the list of young children who didn’t even live to see Christmas, or the teachers who died trying to save them. That’s mainly, I think, because the guns WERE hers, and I can’t believe there isn’t SOMETHING else she could have done to keep them away from her son if she was going to have them in the house.

But not mentioning her at the memorial, or putting her at the bottom of a story just feels … wrong.

Written by: A Specific Person