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GRIEF
Dave Checketts is not a professionally trained
clergyman. The former chairman of Madison Square Garden and the
New York Knicks is currently CEO of Legends Hospitality, the
concessions and merchandise company he jointly owns with the New York
Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. But he’s also a lay minister for
the Mormon Church with oversight of ten Mormon congregations in
Fairfield County Connecticut, including the one in Newtown.
On Friday morning Checketts had left his New
Canaan Connecticut home and headed to his Park Avenue office to
prepare for a weekend business trip to Dallas for Sunday's
Cowboys-Steelers game. He and Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones
planned to host a group of new investors.
But late morning he got an email about a shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary. From his laptop he accessed the church records for
Mormon families in Newtown. Five of them had children that
attended the school.
A series of phone calls confirmed that all of
those children were accounted for except one – six-year-old Emily
Parker, a first grader. Suddenly, it wasn't possible to focus
on business. Checketts cleared his calender for the
afternoon.
Robbie and Alyssa Parker had just moved to
Connecticut from Ogden, Utah. Along with Emily, they have
daughters ages 2 and 4. Robbie, a health care professional,
worked at Danbury Hospital. When Checketts reached him there,
the facility was on lockdown due to the school shooting. Robbie
was on his way to meet his wife at the fire station in Newtown.
She was there with other parents awaiting word on the
children.
Checketts emailed leaders of Mormon congregations
throughout western Connecticut: “Pray for Emily Parker.”
He also organized a prayer service for that night.
Then he headed back to Connecticut. He was almost to the
Parker’s home when he got word that Emily was among the 20 children
who had died. “I didn’t know what to say,” Checketts said.
“I go back and forth between tears and anger. It is just
hard to comprehend.”
The business trip to Dallas got canceled. In
an email, Checketts notified Jones and the investors. One by one,
they expressed condolences and promised prayers.
When Checketts reached the Parker
home, Robbie asked him to lead his family in prayer. While
praying, Checketts felt impressed to say that Robbie would deal with
his grief by speaking publicly about the tragedy, and that he would
emerge as a powerful voice for compassion and peace.
After the prayer, the family's needs were
discussed. Chief among them was finding a mortician.
But funeral homes in the area were overwhelmed. Checketts
promised to take care of everything, including all burial and funeral
expenses.
He called a funeral home in a nearby town.
Six years earlier Checketts had attended a service there for a
young Mormon missionary who was killed by a drunk driver in
Argentina.
“I had to go tell that boy’s parents that he
wasn’t coming home alive,” Checketts said. It was the hardest
thing he’d ever done as an ecclesiastical leader. However, that
experience had introduced Checketts to an unusually empathetic
funeral director.
Suddenly facing an even harder situation,
Checketts reached out to him and asked if he would prepare Emily’s
body for burial. The church, Checketts explained, would cover
all the expenses.
“There will be no expenses,” the funeral director
said.
The following day, after authorities released the
names of the victims, Parker was the first parent to speak to
the national media. Without notes or a spokesman, Robbie choked
back tears and expressed sympathy for the family of the man who
killed 26 people and himself. "I can't imagine how hard
this experience must be for you," he said.
 Robbie
Parker speaks to the media.
Checketts was moved to tears.“What happened in
Newtown is unthinkable,” Checketts said. “But little children
are alive in Christ. Though the nature of the crime is the
essence of evil, our faith tells us that these children burst into
the presence of God and are safe in his arms.”
Grief, while heartbreaking, can also give rise to
powerful acts of compassion. By the time Abraham Lincoln gave
his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, the American Civil War
had claimed roughly 750,000 lives, resulting in 37,000 widows and
90,000 orphans.
Why did God allow such devastation? It was a
question Lincoln had pondered. Plus, there were many in
Washington that wanted to punish the Confederates for all the
carnage. Against that backdrop, Lincoln said:
With malice toward none; with charity for all;
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us
strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's
wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his
widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
One month later Lincoln was assassinated.
But those words – with malice toward none – live on.
It reminds me of the story of Kenneth Brown, a U.S. Marine
serving in Japan after the atomic bomb. It was just before
Christmas when Brown encountered a Japanese professor of music who
introduced himself as a Christian. He said he had a small
children’s choir and asked if they could perform a concert for the
American soldiers.
Brown belonged to a unit of hardened fighters that
had spent four years away from home, battling the Japanese from
Saipan to Iwo Jima. The concert took place on Christmas Eve in
a bombed out theater. The closing number was a solo from ‘The
Messiah’ by a girl who sung with the conviction of one who knew that
Jesus was indeed the Savior of mankind. The soldiers cried.
Afterward, Brown asked the Japanese music
professor: “How did your group manage to survive the bomb?”
“This is only half my group,” he said softly.
“And what of the families of these?”
“They nearly all lost one or more members.
Some are orphans.”
“What about the soloist? She must have the
soul of an angel the way she sang.”
“Her mother, two of her brothers were taken.
Yes, she did sing well. I am so proud of her. She
is my daughter.”
Brown was moved to tears. “We had caused
them the greatest grief,” Brown later wrote. “Yet we were
their Christian brothers and as such they were willing to forget
their grief and unite with us in singing ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to
all men.’ That day I knew there was a greater power on earth
than the atomic bomb.”
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