HARTFORD, Conn. — Erin Kowalski was 11 years old and in sixth grade when her little brother Chase died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Her sister Brittany was a freshman in high school.
It happened on a Friday, a tragedy that rocked the state, the nation and the world.
The Kowalski sisters dealt with the trauma of the shooting — which happened 10 years ago on Dec. 14, 2012 — in different ways.
Erin went back to school the following Monday.
“At first, I suppressed it completely,” Erin said. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I talked to maybe two friends about it, but I suppressed my emotions. I looked like a regular happy kid in middle school, really.
“I think I just kept it in because I didn’t want to make my parents any more upset than they already were,” Erin said. “I thought me being upset would cause them to be upset. But in reality, I should have been upset then. But how would I know that?”
Erin is now a senior at UConn, set to graduate in the spring with a degree in communications. Brittany, 24, is a technology analyst.
“We still butt heads about it all the time, because where I’m at and where she’s at, sometimes it doesn’t line up and the way she does things drives me nuts and the way I do things drives her nuts,” Brittany said.
“We have an understanding now that we’ve dealt with it different and we’re going to deal with it different,” Erin said.
“We’ll get to that elevated state where we’re about to yell at each other and then we’ll separate,” Brittany said. “She’s also very stubborn. But now she’s getting through college, she’s getting better.”
Navigating school, family and life in general
In the days following the tragedy, the last place Erin wanted to be was at home with her family.
“I would go out. I would be gone for days,” Erin said. “I would sleep at friends’ houses in the middle of the week. Now you can’t pry me from them. I come back from college on the weekends.”
After this semester, Erin is moving back home to complete her last semester at UConn online.
Both sisters struggled with school, friendships and life in general. Erin joined cheerleading in school, had a large peer group and papered over her anxiety. Brittany sought out adults in high school to help her.
“I was in therapy before that,” Brittany said. “I was a hot mess. It just added to the hot mess-ness I had going on. I didn’t want to go to school. I had a good group of friends, but after everything happened, it kind of dismantled. They didn’t know how to interact with me. I think I didn’t go to school for at least a month.”
When Brittany went back to Newtown High School, she didn’t want to be in a classroom, even though she wasn’t afraid another shooting would happen like Erin was.
“It would fuel my anxiety because there was so much going on at once and people were just living their normal lives,” Brittany said. “Like, how?”
So she spent a lot of time doing her classwork in a resource room, most of the time by herself.
“I could get a week’s worth of work done in a day,” Brittany said. “If I had the consistency, I could have been in honors classes. I had those high highs where I’m like, ‘I can get everything done. I’m amazing.’ Then I would plummet down like ‘What is life, how am I even doing this?’ And I wouldn’t do anything. It was trying to find that middle ground for the longest time.”
Erin made it through middle school, then crashed in high school. She quit cheerleading midway through her freshman year then stopped going to school.
“I would go to school like one period a day, the end of freshman, beginning of sophomore year,” Erin said. “They had to call the therapist who was assigned to us and she would come to the house and say, ‘You have to come, get out of bed, let’s go.’ I still would not want to go.”
“It was a nightmare,” said her mother, Rebecca.
They went to family therapy. Erin hated it. Brittany and her mother would cry. Stephen, their father, didn’t say much.
“I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t want to be upset in front of them,” Erin said.
“So it was just me and Mom getting upset while they just sat in the room with us,” Brittany said. “Dad and Erin were throwing stuffed animals at each other and not talking.”
A change of location
Brittany and Erin never told people where they were from. Danbury, they would say. Brookfield. Monroe. Anywhere but Newtown or Sandy Hook.
“I told everybody I lived other places,” Brittany said. “Once you say Newtown …”
“‘Newtown? Isn’t that …’?” Stephen said.
“People are like, ‘Ohhhh, do you have a connection?’ ” Rebecca said. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“It’s like forcing you to talk about it,” Brittany said.
Brittany went to Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
“It was kind of a good reset [to go to college], but that was when I started to get the outward anxiety of, ‘These people don’t know who I am right off the bat,’ which was great, but also, ‘Oh my God, they have to find out who I am,’ ” Brittany said.
“At orientation, one of the girls asked, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ I think I said, ‘Danbury’ and she said, ‘Oh, how close to Newtown is that?’ She was putting the pieces together way too fast — I’m still friends with her, she’s very nice — that was the first time I didn’t get the ‘pity face.’ She was almost disgusted with herself.”
“When people ask, ‘Where are you from?’ ” Erin said, “I’m like, ‘Oh boy, is this going to go down that route?”
While Brittany was navigating college, Erin found advocates in the high school psychologist, an academic adviser and a counselor who was delegated to the families who lost a sibling. She was able to, for the most part, work through her issues. She started going back to school regularly by the end of her sophomore year.
Eventually, both sisters learned to advocate for themselves. They told college professors who they were, how they dealt with different issues and that they would not take a final exam if the date happened to fall on Dec. 14. They sat out shooting drills.
Things still came up, though. One time, Brittany opened a textbook in a government class and saw her brother’s name on a page. She had to leave the classroom and later dropped the class.
A guiding light
Brittany has a tattoo on her rib that says “Love, Chase” in his handwriting. She has a dragonfly on her arm that has Chase’s ashes in the ink. There is a clock and the time on the clock is 10:31. Chase’s birthday was Oct. 31.
There is also a lock and key and a lantern.
“The lock and key is my own accountability and the lantern is the light,” Brittany said. “It’s symbolic of depression and pulling myself out of that darkness and not allowing myself to go back. A guiding light, I guess you could say.”
Erin is a coach in the Race for Chase program, which helps kids prepare for and compete in triathlons. Her brother, at age 6, competed in a youth triathlon and her mother started the program after he died.
“I never got to see Chase grow up, but I get to see the kids in the program grow up so that helps fill that void,” Erin said.
The grief is still there, lurking below the surface of their emotions, but for the most part, they’ve learned to deal with it.
“From when I was 11 to now, I deal with it completely different,” Erin said. “When I was younger, I would just kind of dismiss it and lie about where I was from, but now that I’m older, I’ve dealt with my emotions, well, not fully, but coped with it and forced my own way through it.
“I’m OK saying, ‘I live in Newtown,’ because it’s not the immediate thing for everybody to think about.”
“It still ebbs and flows,” Brittany added. “I’ve noticed I’m not as numb as I was. My freshman to junior year of high school, I have no idea what happened.
“I used to have a really good memory. I was really on top of everything. Now I feel like my memory was kind of wiped.”
“Me, too,” Erin said.
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