HARTFORD, Conn. — When Nicole Hockley thinks about who her son, Dylan Hockley, would be today, a crush of questions begins to tumble through her thoughts.
Would he be as tall as her surviving son, Jake, who now peers down at her?
Would he have learned to like any vegetable other than carrots?
“Would he still have that impish smile?” she asks. “Would he still have that same singsong voice?”
Her steady and sure tone speeds up when she speaks of the person he didn’t get to grow into when she lets herself ask who Dylan would be if he weren’t forever 6 years old, the age he was when he walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School for the last time.
She will never know the answers to these questions, but she does know that she doesn’t want Dylan to be forgotten.
“I want people to remember Newtown. I want people to remember Sandy Hook,” she said. “I don’t want people to forget. I don’t want people to forget Dylan.”
She wants the world to remember his piercing blue eyes. How he was scared of thunder but called lightning beautiful. How much he loved to cuddle up with his mom, clinging to her like a koala bear.
Wednesday will mark 10 years since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a harrowing milestone that feels incomprehensible for many of the families whose loved ones were murdered on Dec. 14, 2012.
For a decade now, Nicole Hockley has been working tirelessly to create a legacy for her son. To honor his life by saving others.
Alongside Mark Barden — whose 7-year-old son Daniel Barden was also killed at Sandy Hook — Hockley serves as the co-founder and CEO of Sandy Hook Promise, a Newtown-based nonprofit that works to teach children and adults to know the signs that can help prevent gun violence.
With more than 100 full-time employees living in 23 different states, the Sandy Hook Promise programs have reached more than 18 million people and connected with more than 23,000 schools.
In Newtown, framed photos of Dylan and Daniel welcome you into their home base, a little white house turned national violence prevention headquarters. Workers and volunteers mill around the space, keeping tabs on the many moving parts that keep the nonprofit in motion.
Through free in-school programming, they teach children in classrooms across the country to be inclusive and kind to their classmates. They teach students and teachers alike to know the signs of violence that may have prevented their own attacker from carrying out his plan to kill their children.
In the nonprofit’s national crisis center in Miami, alarm bells sound seemingly every few seconds, taking in tips of potential school shooting threats, suicides and other safety concerns that teams of counselors and emergency responders pool together to respond to, track and prevent.
Hockley’s hope is that the work will continue long past her lifespan. Her mission at Sandy Hook Promise is to help create a culture that empowers children to connect with their classmates and communities, to speak up and say something when signs of violence are visible and to prevent other families from enduring the lifelong grief that hers, and 25 others in Newtown, are still living with a decade after.
“Whether it’s one year, two years, now 10 and later 20, nothing will ever change how much we miss him, how much we love him, or how much we hurt without him in our lives,” Hockley wrote recently, ahead of the impending anniversary.
She and Dylan’s father, Ian Hockley, have often referred to their son as a butterfly.
Dylan, who was on the autism spectrum, liked to flap his arms — or, as they say, “flap his wings.”
They’ve tried to turn the flap of his wings into a butterfly effect, a ripple that causes a hurricane, a short life that saves so many more.
“There’s a saying that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane halfway around the world,” Nicole Hockley wrote. " I believe if one butterfly can cause a hurricane, imagine if the millions of people who want to protect their families and communities from gun violence choose to flap their wings, too.”
Also in his memory, Ian Hockley, runs the nonprofit organization Dylan’s Wings of Change, which aims to use experimental education to empower people to see their worth, believe that they matter and empathize with their peers.
The work they’re both doing is a way to honor those who were killed and keep their memories in motion, making a difference and saving lives. According to their data, Sandy Hook Promise’s work has prevented at least 11 credible school shooting plots and more than 80 acts of school violence involving a firearm.
“Every life that’s saved is a life that Dylan helped save,” said Nicole Hockley. “I need to bring meaning to his death and I just don’t want people to ever forget my beautiful little boy.”
This December, as they honor the 10-year remembrance of Dylan’s death, she hopes that his memory will live as vividly as it did in her dreams just after he died.
“I had this dream where Jake and [Dylan] ran up to me and threw their arms around me and hugged me,” she said. “And in the dream, I couldn’t feel Jake but Dylan felt so, so real. So incredibly real, that hug, that feeling, the smell of his hair, the way he was holding onto me.”
She considers it his one last hug. And his hugs are what she misses the most.
“I miss his cuddles,” she said recently, recalling how even at 6 he would perch on his mother’s hip and wrap his arms around her neck.
“He just loved to be close to people. If you sat on the couch he’d sit right next to you, pressed up against you.”
He loved to lie in the warm sand at the beach, to eat chocolate and to bounce on trampolines. She remembers these moments every day, she said, and hopes that the world remembers him, too.
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