That Monday
That Monday (March 27, 2023) was the worst day of my life. Even years later, the visceral details remain vivid. I can still taste the road trip snacks—peanut butter Bamba and sour gummies. iPads blared from the backseat, each child watching something different, and every cupholder in the car sloshed with something sticky and half-finished.
We had just left a Disney cruise and were making the long drive home to Nashville from New Orleans, wrapped in the easy contentment of a family vacation that had gone exactly right. Nothing felt urgent. Nothing felt wrong. Until 10:13am.
My husband, Ben, was driving and his phone dinged a tone I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t know then that it was an alert from the emergency response app used by teachers at the school where he teaches and our children attend. The color had left his face and I had never seen his expression before. I did not immediately ask questions because it was clear that whatever was happening on the other end of the phone didn’t have words yet, and he needed to pull the car over. Maybe my father-in-law was having a stroke in the car behind us. My mind went to the scariest places I could imagine, as one does. What I didn’t yet know was that there’s a scarier place than I’d contemplated before.
We came to an abrupt stop in the median, tires skidding across the pavement and into the grass. While urgently typing into his own phone, he reached for my phone and typed those three haunting numbers: 9-1-1. We still hadn’t exchanged any words. I’m not entirely sure that I heard what he muttered to the emergency operator, but I remember the pleading. “Please hurry. Get there as fast as you can. Please, please, I’m begging you. I’m begging you to hurry.” At this point, silent tears rolled down my cheeks. Quiet, helpless cries.
Vehicles whizzed by us at highway speeds, rocking our stopped SUV in a grim lullaby. Still on my phone with the emergency operator, Ben called out coaching words into his own phone: “Stay in your hard corners, even if the noise stops. Do not leave your hard corners.” These will always be the most harrowing words I have ever heard.
We were silent. I softly touched his back because I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, finally, finally someone–either Ben or the emergency operator still on the line–said, “It’s over.”
For the last 14 minutes, our beloved elementary school–the site that would become known as “the Covenant School shooting”-- had suffered a deadly attack by a psychopath with an assault rifle, and it was over.
“It’s over” is supposed to mean the threat has passed. The phrase suggests a clear-cut ending, but that Monday, it meant more than one thing. Life before—when I wasn’t petrified to drop my kids off at school—was over. Life before my children knew a life where their peers could be killed en masse; it’s over. A bright line had been drawn: before that Monday, and after. But the hurt was only just unfolding, and I immediately resented the finality of those words.
Like a pressure valve blowing open, our bodies gave way all at once. I grabbed whatever receptacle was in arm’s reach and vomited over and over, my stomach unable to settle. Ben melted in anguish, crying so intensely it pulled our children’s attention from their iPads and made them aware, suddenly, that we were stopped by the side of the road and that something really terrible was happening.
Ideally we would have been able to gather ourselves, regulate our own emotions, and–impossibly–rewind life. I told them there was an emergency in Nashville, that we were scared and sad, and that we needed more information before we could explain it. Our oldest is inquisitive and detail-oriented and she wanted to know what kind of emergency was happening. An information gatherer myself, I had read at least 50 parenting books and not once do I remember an expert addressing how to tell your child that a murderer was in the hallways of her school, hunting her friends and teachers. Instead, Ben blurted: “it’s a tornado.” We tried to comfort them but weren’t ready to share much, so we instructed them to put on their headphones and to watch a movie at full volume.
My phone filled with texts from fellow panicked parents, everyone accessing their respective classroom group chats to make sense of the cavalry of sirens surrounding the school. Then the school sent an emergency message to parents, directing them to a reunification center and offering little other information they had at the time.
Ben found some heroic emotional regulation and became stoic and measured on phone calls. He was doing what he could to support the school from afar, using both our phones to communicate with law enforcement and support the school’s leadership team as they worked through the immediate aftermath. By then, Ben knew from his conversations with school leadership which students and staff had been shot, but he didn’t tell me. I tried not to press him for information, but through tears I asked only one question: were Margot and Lola accounted for? I needed to know if I was about to tell my daughters their best friends were gone.
The number of minutes between when a parent learns of a mass shooting at their child’s school and when they hear from a teacher that their child is safe—that time is lived in agony. I was fighting an overwhelming instinct to relieve my friends of the agony of the unknown with what little information I could glean from Ben. What a grace it would be to see these words on your phone: “Your child is alive.” I knew Margot and Lola had survived and I wanted to tell their mothers in case they hadn’t yet heard. But Ben was using my phone and I could not access it to offer that information. And, even if I could, what if I was wrong? Given what an assault rifle does to a child’s body, what if a child was misidentified? What if in the midst of the pandemonium and shock, a child is wrongly accounted for? Sharing erroneous information about a child’s aliveness would be cruel, even if accidental. Knowing what I knew felt unbearable. What a parent really wants is to hold their child in their arms, and a text from me–saving them 2 minutes of agony–would not have been ultimately helpful, so I refrained.
It’s possible that what I wanted from sharing early information was to relieve my own shame for not having to experience that anguish of waiting along with my friends. I did not have to experience even one second of wondering if my child (or husband) was alive. It was a strange humiliation that my ears did not have to bear witness to the cries of a mother just informed of her worst nightmare.
Between phone calls, Ben eventually offered that if our daughters had been at school, our younger daughter would have followed her P.E. teacher to relative safety by running out of the building and down a hill with her classmates as fast as their little preschool legs would go, and our oldest daughter would have been hiding in a barricaded closet with her first grade classmates and art teacher. It’s hard to think about where Ben would have been that morning. One of the victims, Cindy, was serving as his substitute teacher that day—his path through the school likely would have been the same as hers, and likely the same fate. I don’t know Cindy’s family personally, but I sometimes lurk on their social media profiles to see how they are doing with the grief that was meant for me.
The stress of experiencing something in real time but from the relative safety of a vehicle put me in utter shock. Horror and relief aren’t meant to exist together, but they did. My mind couldn’t hold both. Everything felt darker, heavier, like something fundamental had shifted and wouldn’t shift back.
The texts outside of our school community started coming in. It was manageable at first because only people who were on Twitter had heard rumblings of something happening. “Just saw the news–are Ben and the girls okay?” Then the local news reported on the events and calls and texts were coming in by the dozens. Then national news started reporting on the story and I could no longer keep up. My husband and I had both lived in multiple states throughout our lives and it seemed that everyone we ever knew, from all over the country, was reaching out with concern.
It didn’t take long to become paralyzing. If I was unable to respond to a text message right away, sometimes the silence would concern the person so they would follow up with a phone call. If I didn’t answer the phone, they’d call again. This panic response compounded with hundreds of friends and family. I silenced notifications to my phone, then copied and pasted “safe” to as many text messages as possible before Ben needed my phone again. The calls and texts would pile up again, and I’d respond in bulk at my next opportunity. People deserve to know that the humans they love are safe in the wake of a tragedy and I did my best to give them that regard.
Once the local news broke the story, I got texts from aggressive reporters. “Mrs Gatlin, is your husband Matt a teacher at Covenant Presbyterian? This is so-and-so from so-and-so news outlet and I’m checking if he’s safe.” That is not my husband’s name, nor is it the name of the school. He had likely pulled names from the school’s website and matched them to public records, getting it wrong in the process. He reached out with a guise of concern, but was clearly hoping to get some early information from me to deliver career-advancing clicks on his news website. My cheeks were hot with rage. I ignored the message in the moment, but a week later, responded simply, “Are you asking a stranger, via unsolicited text message, if she’s a widow?” I did not expect or get a response.
In the weeks that followed, several people pointed us to the movie We Are Marshall, the true story of a college rebuilding after a plane crash kills nearly its entire football team—except for an assistant coach who chose to drive, and a player sidelined by injury. Their survival isn’t a relief so much as a complication. It leaves them holding two truths at once: that they are lucky to be alive, and that their luck came at a cost they can’t justify.
That’s the closest language I have for what this felt like. My husband and children were not in those classrooms. And because of that, we were spared a kind of devastation that other families were forced to absorb. But being spared doesn’t feel clean. It comes with a quiet, disorienting guilt that still lives in me 3 years later.
There are so many stories from that day that aren’t mine to tell. Stories of teachers who defied their own terror to move children to safety and use their own bodies as sacrificial protection. Of first responders who ran toward what the rest of us couldn’t bear to imagine. Of a community that showed up, again and again, to carry one another through the aftermath. Of an entire city that never left us on our own. Of grieving families who are still putting one foot in front of another. Of children showing incredible resilience after the unthinkable.
I have heard many of these stories in fragments—in whispered conversations, in tearful retellings, in moments of quiet awe. Each one deserves more space than I can give here. But together, they form something steady and unshakable: proof that even on the worst day, there were people who met it with courage, with selflessness, and care.
Sometimes I return to the beginning of March 27, 2023—the hum of the road, the kids’ voices layered over their iPads, the taste of our car snacks. It was all so ordinary, so forgettable, and now I can’t forget any of it. We didn’t know then that everything was about to divide.
Our middle daughter has an oversized fear of weather events. Thunder, lightning, threats of tornadoes, all of it. A play therapist suggested that this could be that when we fibbed that there was a tornado in Nashville, her little body might have connected weather events to the trauma of that Monday. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening, but it would certainly make sense because the body keeps score. We have since become much more trauma-informed about how we talk to our kids about difficult topics. It feels like we were previously playing recreational parenting and on that Monday we were called up to varsity. We had no choice but to rise to the occasion and we have.
There is a version of us that lived before 10:13am, when the world still felt intact. And then there is the version of us that lives after. We carry both—the life we lost without knowing it, and the one we are still learning how to hold.