"For this we live a thousand years; For this we love, and we live because we love..."

 Eli was not quite 4 months old during the first mass shooting of his life. It was an unseasonably warm December day and I had taken him to the Queens Zoo for the first time. He wore a blue hat with stegosaurus scales poking up at the top and teeny yellow socks with no shoes. 

When we got home, I plopped him in his jumperoo as the news from Sandy Hook unfurled, and I remember looking over at him and being struck, as if for the first time, by the realization that I was this boy's mother — that I had this baby bouncing in front of me when 20 babies in Connecticut would never do anything again.

Sandy Hook was unfathomable to me, but somehow it wasn't yet unbearable because it was inconceivable. It was impossible to grasp the scope of it, the cruelty, the pointlessness, the abruptness with which my entire conception of reality could pivot to something terrifying. I read and reread the news articles, the tributes, the analyses, as if knowledge was a kind of talisman, as if absorbing every gutting detail would protect me from living it myself.

I think about those children every December. When Eli turned 7, when he turned 8, I thought about how devastated I'd been that day in 2012, looking at my baby, and I thought about how little I'd really understood back then about how much life really is contained within a 7-year-old, how many funny dance moves and wiggly teeth and ice cream mustaches you would miss. He's outlived them, I thought. All that life, those pajama parties and birthday cupcakes and T-ball games and light-up sneakers, and somehow Eli had surpassed them all. It didn't seem fair. (It wasn't fair.)

When Eli was little and he was upset with himself over something he'd done wrong — or upset with me because he thought I was upset with him — I had this little mantra I'd say for soothing both of us. "I love you all the time," I'd say. "I love you even when you're mad, I love you even when you're sad, I love you all the time."

That mantra came back to me this week when I was watching Amerie Jo Garza's father on CNN talk to Anderson Cooper in Uvalde. Someone had printed and framed a photo of his daughter, a photo that had just been taken that morning at the school honor roll ceremony, and he was hugging it to his chest in place of his daughter, in a way that hurts to look at because you can tell his arms ache for his daughter, his daughter he calls "my baby" even though she was a whole decade away from being a baby, a whole decade of tie-dye T-shirts and peace signs and a jar in which she was saving up her allowance for Disney World. Not just a decade but a lifetime. Not just a child but the entirety of a life.

I thought about what it means to say "I love you all the time" — Eli, what it would mean to love you after you're gone, to love you and long for you, to love you and hurt desperately, to love you and keep loving you.

I've never thought of myself as brave. I don't stand up to bullies and I don't free-climb rock faces and whenever there's a needle in the vicinity, I close my eyes and look away. Eli, just a few weeks ago I told you that when I need to feel brave — like when I went to the allergist and felt anxious about all the patches on my back — I think of you because you're the bravest person I know, all nerve and heart and loud mouth. 

But to love you all the time, Eli, in this world — that feels to me like the bravest thing I can do right now, the only thing I know how to do. My therapist told me this morning that we make most of our decisions out of either fear or love. It would be unlike me to say "I choose love," to say something neat and precious that one could produce on a Cricut and sell on Etsy. 

But I do. I do, Eli. I love you all the time — all your fencing sabres and Roblox hacks and soft cheeks and the freckle between your toes. I love you even when it's unbearable to imagine life without you, even when my heart breaks for Amerie Jo Garza's dad and every other parent in Uvalde and Sandy Hook and every other place that is pulsing with loss. I love you because I choose to be brave. I love you because all I want for you is for your lifetime to be as big and bold as brave as you imagine. The life the children in Sandy Hook and Uvalde won't get to live. I love you because all I want for you is your life.