A Painful Choice

The Parkers moved to Newtown in January 2012 for Robbie’s job as a physician’s assistant in the neonatal intensive care unit at Danbury Hospital, falling in love with the town’s quaint center, it’s tall church steeple, the colonial houses, the general store. They bought a four-bedroom ranch on Country Squire Lane, a leafy cul-de-sac, thinking of all the milestones their daughters would hit in the home. It would be the house where they’d celebrate Emilie loosing her first tooth, getting a driver’s license, graduating high school, leaving for college.

The Parkers quickly got to work making the home their own. Alissa and her father spent weeks tearing down walls and building closets. While the younger girls, 4-year-old Madeline and 3-year-old Samantha, would have rooms upstairs, Emilie’s bedroom would be in the finished basement, with an adjacent craft room for the budding artist.

The room became a special project for Alissa and her oldest daughter.

Emilie wanted to paint her room bright pink — her favorite color. Afraid it’d be a bit too much, Alissa suggested a light gray for the walls to make her daughter’s pink accessories pop. Together they picked out a hot pink bed and topped it with a white quilt covered in bright pink and baby pink ruffles. Stuffed animals crowded the pillows. Emilie, artistically inclined and attentive to detail even at her young age, helped Alissa stencil black, blue and pink flowers on the walls of the room. Emilie choose pink curtains and she and Alissa sewed matching pillows for the bed side-by-side on their sewing machines.

On the morning on Dec. 14, 2012, Alissa remembers how Emilie crawled into bed with her, put her face near Alissa and said a cheery “Hi Mom.” They cuddled in the blankets. Alissa didn’t want the moment with her daughter to end and wished they could spend the day cuddled up inside.

But soon it was time to get ready for school. They went downstairs to Emilie’s bedroom to pick out her outfit for the day — an all pink ensemble with a purple scarf Alissa’s mother had made tied round her neck. As they sat in her room, Emilie remarked that the large Zinnia-like flowers painted across her bedroom wall were all separate, but also connected. Some had black petals and pink centers, while others had pink petals and black centers.

Alissa nodded her head and smiled.

They gathered up Madeline and Samantha and walked down to the bus stop at the end of street as a foursome. They had a routine. After a quick kiss, Emilie would wave from the bus as it pulled away.

That morning, Madeline had wandered off and gotten stuck on a hill while they waited for the bus. Alissa only had time to quickly hug Emilie before rushing off to help her younger daughter. Emilie didn’t wave from the bus that morning. Alissa remembers thinking: “It’s just this once.”

There are news photos of Robbie and Alissa from that day, pictures that capture the shock, the disbelief, but most of all the pain of learning the unthinkable had claimed the life of their little girl. In the days that followed, Alissa would wake up, look around the house and feel like throwing up.

“All of the love, the warmth I had felt there before was gone,” she said.

A few months later, the Parkers flew to Washington for a friend’s wedding. They had lived in the Pacific Northwest when Emilie was a toddler and Robbie was studying to be a physician’s assistant, spending their days going to picnics in the Portland Rose Garden, hiking the forests and playing together on the beaches.

There, the memories of Emilie were all happy ones: Emilie in a red dress and pink rainboots playing on the Oregon Coast. Emilie and Alissa sneaking up on seagulls. Emilie searching for sand dollars.

At the wedding, Robbie and Alissa found a moment of quiet together and were struck by how it felt to be 3,000 miles away from Newtown. They could breathe again. Robbie wondered out loud: Should they consider leaving Connecticut? They thought about it, but wanted to make sure if they left Newtown they weren’t simply running away from their struggles. As part of their trip, Robbie visited with one of his old professors, who told him a position had opened up at a local NICU. She told Robbie if he were interested, she’d recommend him for the job.

Back home in Newtown, reminders of the shooting were everywhere. The town’s outpouring of grief took the form of green ribbons pinned to grocery store clerk aprons; T-shirts with 12.14.12 emblazoned on them popped up at the gym. Trips to the grocery store became difficult. Robbie once went to IKEA 20 miles away and was hugged by three strangers.

“When I would drive anywhere, I knew the route the shooter had taken,” Alissa said. “ I knew the route I had taken that day to the school and even if I went out of my way to not think about it or avoid these spots, I’d see people who had become a trigger for me.”

“It was for love and support, but for me, it was constantly reminding me of how my daughter lost her life,” Alissa said.

Rat Pack Of Sisters

The day before Halloween, when Madeline and Samantha come home from school, the quiet house outside Vancouver fills with giggles, urgent questions and flashes of pink and turquoise as the girls fly from one room to another putting on jackets to play outside. Samantha puts on pink rain boots, swapping out the white unicorn-themed sneakers, complete with a purple horn sprouting out of the toecap, she’d worn to school.

When the family moved to the three-acre property nearly four years ago, they got chickens to keep outside. A coyote killed the chickens recently, but the coop now has new tenants — a pair of kittens named Pirate and Orion.

“Look he likes pink, Sam,” Madeline says, pointing to one of the kittens climbing over Samantha’s boots.

The girls would play that way in Newtown, too, three sisters building cities out of blocks, Emilie performing tricks with her Hula Hoop. They’d have tea parties at the kitchen table and paint side-by-side in the craft room. When Robbie came home from work, Emilie would have her sisters in hiding spots around the house to jump out at him.

For Robbie and Alissa, the question of the girls was a delicate one. Their challenge was finding a way to create a happy childhood for their daughters, while also preserving the memory of their big sister.

“They were this rat pack of sisters,” Robbie sighs.

The Horror Relived

If moving to Washington was a way to protect the memory of how Emilie lived, when Alissa is on the road talking about school safety she is brutally frank about how her 6-year-old died.

Just after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot through the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary School with a Bushmaster AR-15. After he killed Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, Lanza paced for several minutes in the front office of Sandy Hook Elementary School before continuing his spree, going from one classroom to the next. Alissa tells the crowds that come to hear her speak how Emilie was still alive as the first police officers were arriving at the scene, hiding in a bathroom with her classmates.

Alissa started doing speaking engagements after co-founding Safe and Sound Schools, the nonprofit she runs with Michele Gay. Gay’s daughter Josephine was also killed in the shooting. The nonprofit has pooled security, mental health and law enforcement expertise to help school districts address safety flaws and prevent events like Sandy Hook.

Standing in front of a crowd of 500 at the Delaware Country District Attorney’s Safe Schools Summit in Philadelphia on Oct. 10, Alissa is calm and collected as she recounts the horrifying details of her daughter’s final hour. She wears a blouse of bright orange, the color associated with safety.

Alissa’s voice doesn’t shake. She doesn’t stop to choke back a tear, though nearly everyone in the audience has been silently crying from the moment she started speaking.The crowd in the banquet hall goes silent. Alissa’s measured, soft voice echoes through the cavernous room.

When she shows a picture of the plane that brought Emilie’s body to Utah for her funeral, Alissa retreats and takes a deep breath before describing what happened. How the pilot asked everyone to remain seated on the plane until Emilie’s body was off. How airport staff lined up for Emilie. That well-wishers lined up stuffed animals and flowers to welcome back Emilie to the state where she’d been born.

As soon as the slide clicks away from the picture of the plane, she reassures the audience.

The Dark And The Light

On the last day of October, there’s a wintry bite in the Brush Prairie air. The morning sun was struggling to cut through a cold fog that hangs low in the cedar-lined valleys, putting a damper on Robbie and Alissa’s plans to go for a run after dropping the girls at school. But by noon, the air has warmed enough and they take off on a six-mile run along a creek in a local park.

Robbie and Alissa have been close since they met in middle school in Ogden, Utah, and that’s one way the couple hasn’t changed. When Alissa is home from her speaking engagements and Robbie is off duty at the hospital, they take time to be together. Running. Picking up the girls from school. Just catching up.

The pain of tragedies can pull people apart. But Robbie and Alissa have come out of it stronger.

“My marriage is stronger because of the things Robbie and I suffered together,” Alissa wrote in her book, “An Unseen Angel.” “We both had to find a way to speak our anger and frustration without hurting each other. We had to resist becoming bitter. We had to put each other’s needs first, striving to understand before demanding to be understood. We still work at it constantly.”