Nurturing, healing, love: How Jesse Lewis’ final chalkboard message shaped a social movement after Sandy Hook

Jesse Lewis is buried in the back corner of a centuries-old cemetery on a hilltop that overlooks the rooftop of his favorite breakfast spot where he often stopped for sandwiches on his way to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

When the 6-year-old was buried a decade ago, a barely budding tree was growing near his plot. Now, 10 years later, it towers over his tombstone, a tangible testament to the passage of time since the tragedy.

As the 10-year remembrance of the shooting grew closer, the branches of the tree hung high over the grave, a bitter December wind rustling through the leaves still clinging onto the branches and the flags and pinwheels stuck in the soil. Jesse’s grave is covered with tokens of the things he loved: a football, soccer ball and baseball. Rubber ducks and firetrucks. Race cars and a Christmas tree.

“This is the reality,” his mother Scarlett Lewis said, stepping toward the tombstone, her boots crunching in the fallen leaves as her red pickup truck idled nearby. “Ten years later, this is the reality.”

The reality is that her son who once stomped around their farm in horse-shaped rubber boots, was murdered — a word she intentionally uses to describe her son’s death.

“I didn’t lose him. He didn’t die. He was viciously murdered,” she said. “And I think unless we have the courage to be in the reality of what happened we’re not going to be able to solve it.”

As she walked away, Lewis touched her fingers to her lips and pressed a kiss to the image of her little boy that marks his memorial, a toothy smile beaming in his school photo.

[ The tragedy at Sandy Hook: 10-year remembrance ]

On this morning a December frost covered Connecticut as the sun peeked through a hazy gray sky over the cemetery. The weather mirrored the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, when Jesse’s dad had picked him up for school at his mother’s farm.

A similar frost covered the farm that morning as his parents prepared for what was to be a short day for the first-grader, ending with them visiting the school to make gingerbread houses.

Before he left for school, Jesse dug his finger into the dusting of ice on the car and wrote a message to his mom.

“I love you” he carved into the frost on the window and door. He decorated it with hearts. Lewis snapped a photo, not knowing it would be the last she ever took of her son.

After leaving the note for his mom, Jesse offered his father a similar set of last words.

Before he walked to his first-grade classroom, he placed a hand on his father Neil Heslin’s shoulder. He told him he loved him and his mom and that everything was going to be OK. His father tried to remind him that they’d see him soon, that a plan was in place for both mom and dad to join him to build the gingerbread houses.

“That’s not going to happen,” Jesse countered. And he was right.

At about 9:30 a.m., 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot his way into the elementary school, killing 20 first graders and six women who tried to protect them. Jesse, law enforcement told his family, died a hero. When Lanza entered his classroom, he paused for just a few seconds — either his weapon jammed or he needed to reload — and in those seconds, Jesse told his classmates to run. Nine of them listened and lived.

Jesse’s last words to his parents that morning were just some of the messages that he left behind for his family who has tried to live their lives by his words and build a legacy for him.

In his brother JT’s bedroom he left a neatly folded piece of graph paper with the words “have a lot of fun.” Those words are now etched into his tombstone and part of his mother’s mission to empower people with empathy and emotional intelligence.

Scarlett Lewis still lives in the 1700s farmhouse where she raised Jesse and JT not far from the cemetery, where Apache, the horse Jesse learned to ride on, still grazes in the yard and his donkey Turquoise still trots up to the fence line to greet visitors.

Photos of Jesse light up the interior as much as the striking teal paint on the kitchen cabinets and the punchy peach and coral roses that border them.

Reminders of his life are all over, like his many little green army men, once scattered all around and now resting, untouched, in a glass bowl on the coffee table.

A purple screen door hinges on the pantry bordering a sliver of still-white wall covered with faded pencil marks. The marks, which start close to the floor and inch their way up the wall, once tracked Jesse and JT’s growth. Lewis points to the last time Jesse’s height was recorded: Oct. 4, 2012.

“You can see that Jesse’s just stopped,” said Lewis, peering up to where her surviving son’s reached.

On another wall, Jesse left another note, now covered with plexiglass to preserve it forever. Lewis said has guided her every action for 10 years.

It’s a message that Jesse scrawled in messy penmanship on a chalkboard on the side of the stove. In a slanting font, letters ranging in size from illegibly small to overwhelmingly large, he had written in his best spelling attempt: “Norturting Helinn Love” or, “Nurturing, Healing, Love.”

That message turned into a movement that Lewis has used to help people reach to the root of what she thinks led to the murder of her son: A lack of nurturing, healing and love.

Lewis launched the Choose Love movement in Jesse’s memory to teach social emotional learning tools. From school-age children to incarcerated adults to members of the military, the non-profit’s programming aims to enable people with the tools they need to understand their emotions, prepare for life’s painful moments and grow through them.

Their teachings aim to help people establish and lean on healthy connections, self-regulate their emotions and lead with compassion. The goal, Lewis said, is to reduce the suffering she thinks leads to acts of violence, by practicing daily the words her son implored her to live by after he was gone.

Lewis still remembers the first time she spotted the note and how it nearly brought her to her knees.

She had made her way back to the farmhouse for the first time after the shooting. She walked into her son’s bedroom to do the unthinkable: choose what clothes her child would be buried in. She chose flannel-lined jeans, like the ones he was wearing when he died, a turtleneck and a pullover sweater.

“He was a snappy dresser,” she said. But it was also winter in New England, and she wanted him to be warm.

As she walked back toward the front of the house, her child’s funeral clothes stacked in her arms, she spotted the message he had left, three words that shaped how she would try to change the world.

“It absolutely came from Jesse,” she said. “I was stunned. It completely changed my life. I knew that it was the solution,” she said.

“That if Adam Lanza had been able to receive nurturing, healing, love the tragedy would never have happened.”

Lewis said she remembers knowing very early on, even before she saw Jesse’s chalkboard directive, that she needed to feel compassion for Lanza in order to heal.

“I know that somebody who could do something so heinous must have been in a tremendous amount of pain. So rather than hating him, I wondered what happened to him,” she said.

“Adam Lanza wasn’t born a mass murderer,” said Lewis. “None of them were. Our kids aren’t born wanting to kill themselves and then going on to commit homicide. They’re cultivated into what they become, and it’s by pain. So I asked the question ‘What could we have done to prevent this? Where did we fail?’”

Over the past decade, many families whose loved ones were killed in Sandy Hook have tried to solve different pieces of the puzzle left after the tragedy. Lewis’ approach has been to start at the root of the emotional pain she thinks people like Lanza must have felt and lacked the tools to manage.

“It’s never a snap, it’s a long slow steady decline,” she said. “We know that it’s caused by pain and we can give kids the skills and tools to manage that pain before it gets to that. And that’s what Choose Love does.

“The whole tragedy started with an angry thought in Adam Lanza’s mind. And the amazing thing to me is that an angry thought can be changed,” she said. “So I ask everybody to think about what they think about, and to change one angry thought a day into a loving one.”

She hopes that that small action, repeated every day, can save lives. Because she thinks it could have saved her son’s.

Sitting at her kitchen table on Dec. 5, a cup of tea in her hand, Lewis remembered a moment three weeks before the shooting. She mimics the way she held a wine glass that night, swishing it around as she chatted with her mother when Jesse came barrelling into the kitchen, something he had a habit of doing.

But rather than bursting through in a playful fit that night, he came in and asked her what he would do if a shooter came into his school.

Without really thinking about it much, his mother thought tactically. Her son loved his military stories, after all. “You’d zigzag,” she said. He accepted the answer and went back to his room.

Now, in the 20/20 of hindsight, she wonders if Jesse’s thoughts of how to protect himself and his classmates led to his heroic behavior that day when he risked his life to tell them to run.

She tried to channel the bravery that her little boy exemplified when she was figuring how to survive and go on to tackle what she calls a pandemic of school violence. She drew her strength from the chalkboard, the words she considers a calling that she couldn’t ignore, a directive from her son in his final moments.

“I thought about his tremendous courage when he faced the shooter and saved nine of his classmates’ lives,” she said. “And I thought, if he had the courage to do that, I can have the courage to completely change the trajectory of my life and just dedicate it to just keeping our kids safe.”

She knows how many people’s lives have been changed and saved because of her son, but she still finds herself in tears every single day. She cries for her son and for the growing list of families that have to share in her pain.

Ten years out, with her pain still raw, she wants people to recognize that change is possible and necessary. She wants people to know that if this level of pain could come to her quiet corner of Connecticut, it can find them.

“We still have this thought in the back of our minds that it will never happen to us. I certainly felt that way before it happened to Sandy Hook,” she said. “But here’s the thing that 10 years later, I realize, even if your child is never murdered in school; even if your child never commits suicide; even if your child is never suffering from mental illness, you know somebody that is.”

“It’s something that’s touching all of us at this point, this suffering, and really it is our responsibility.”

On the anniversary, she wants people to ask themselves how they can act on that responsibility. How their daily thoughts and actions can be shaped by Jesse’s advice.

“Ten years letter, I think we get removed from what this really means. We’re doing it because of this,” she says, gesturing to a photo of her son. “And let’s not forget that. This is the real hard reality.”

The hard reality surrounds her as she makes this call to action. Snapshots of Jesse hang on the wall and clutter the refrigerator, showing him sprawled out in the grass, wearing goggles in the bathtub, hugging his mom.

In a frame made of red and green popsicle sticks and bordered with gold glitter, Jesse smiles in a navy sweater vest. His name is written on the back in his childlike scrawl, beside a generous slab of glue and a timestamp of his last Christmas, in kindergarten at Sandy Hook. Lewis clutches the frame and remembers her son.

He is known as a hero for multiple reasons, she says. For saving his classmates and for writing the chalkboard message that has transformed lives, including her own.

“How do I want to live my life? Do I want to live my life being against something? Or do I want to live my life being for something, for the most powerful element in the universe? The unifier that makes us feel good?” Lewis asks. “I don’t want to live fighting against something my whole life, being angry. I don’t want to be another victim of Adam Lanza.”

So she chooses love, she said.

To learn more about the Choose Love movement, visit: https://chooselovemovement.org/. In the wake of the tragedy, the Sandy Hook families expressed how they each wanted their loved ones to be remembered. To read their memories, visit mysandyhookfamily.org.

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