Opinion | How School Shootings Make Children Think About Death

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By Anne Lamott

Ms. Lamott is a novelist and the author, most recently, of “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” and other nonfiction books.

I was a Sunday school teacher for 30-plus years until recently, in a small liberal church in Northern California that rose out of the civil rights movement. I learned early on that when you have a lot of poor kids as students, you get to know tragedy up close — addicted or dead parents, shootings, the injuries and mortification of racism and poverty. So we talked more about tragedy than you might expect.

I never tried to comfort them with nice Christian bumper sayings or platitudes, especially after school shootings like the one at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. “Hey, kids. Yay! God’s got a plan! Phew.” Still, we did believe that death was a pretty major change of address and that God caught the children as they left this life.