Scarlett Lewis: Nurturing Healing Love
On December 14, 2012, Scarlett Lewis experienced something that no parent ever should: she lost her son Jesse Lewis in an act of unimaginable violence. The day started just like any other, but when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Scarlett’s life changed forever. But this isn’t a story about a massacre. It’s a story about love and survival. It’s about how to face the impossible, how to find courage when you think you have none, and how to choose love instead of anger, fear, or hatred.
Following Jesse Lewis’ death, Scarlett Lewis went on an unexpected journey, inspired by a simple three-word message he had scrawled on a chalkboard in their home: “nurturing healing love”. It was as if he knew just what his family would need to go on after this terrible event. Bolstered by his note, Scarlett took her first step toward a new life. And with each step, it became clearer how real Jesse Lewis’ message was.
With her decision made, she found some peace and began to believe that choosing love was the key to creating a healthy, safe, and happy world. And so she began the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation to create a curriculum to teach children about the power each of us has to change our thoughts and choose a life without fear and hate.
Scarlett Lewis Interview by Dirk Terpstra
During the Divine Love event on Maui, I met with the beautiful Scarlett Lewis, and we spoke about purpose in life and about choosing Love.
OMTimes: You strongly believe that your son Jesse was born to save his classmates on that faithful day, and you have said: “I believe that this was a large part of his purpose”. How can we find, or, at least, recognize our own purpose?
Scarlett Lewis: That’s a great question. I know I hadn’t found my purpose until Jesse died and I saw it written there on our chalkboard. We can assume that all of our purposes are to be in service to others, and I think that when you start outside yourself and start asking the question of “How can I serve?” then I believe your purpose will become apparent, and you’ll find meaning in life.
OMTimes: You said: “I am always heartbroken.” How is a broken heart capable of feeling love?
Scarlett Lewis: I have also said: “My heart is broken open” – A broken heart is a love. It’s missing the physical person, but I believe that love never ends. I wrote a children’s book ten years ago before Jesse was born, and it is called Rose’s Foal. It’s a story about a mother horse and a baby horse that was born on my farm in Connecticut, and I wove into the story the five most important lessons that a mother can teach her child – the last lesson was that the mother horse is telling her foal: “Even though we may not always live on the same farm, our love will transcend distance and time forever and always”. Then I ended the book: “Love never ends”. So, even though I am in pain because I have lost the physical body of Jesse, our love never ends, it’s always present.
OMTimes: You currently teach people to change hateful thoughts into loving thoughts. What is your approach?
Scarlett Lewis: One of the greatest lessons that I’ve learned is that we can’t always control what happens to us, but we can always, always control how we react to it. Choice has become so prominent in everything that I teach, and everything that I do, and I have come to realize that almost everything is a choice. We can’t always choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we react to it – I talk about choosing a loving thought over an angry thought and the fact that it is just a choice, and you can always choose to see a different perspective.
OMTimes: How did you handle all of the political fall-outs about gun control issues? Was this something you felt you wanted to address?
Scarlett Lewis: There is a lot of coverage about guns… I decided early on to be ‘for’ something instead of ‘against something’…when the tragedy happened I asked myself what the main issue in our society is today that might have caused something like this to happen – and ultimately felt it is anger… I feel like we are not taught to understand that we can control our thoughts, and we are not victims of what goes through our mind. I believe we are all working towards the same goal – that this tragic event or one like it never happens again. Different people chose different routes, but we are all working towards the same outcome. I have chosen not to speak on the topic of gun control.
OMTimes: You started a foundation in honor of your son—The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation. Tell me what the foundation supports.
Scarlett Lewis: The goal of the foundation is to plant an underlying optimism in our children which will cultivate resiliency. So, when life gets tough, we can make good choices and overcome, instead of being stuck. Ultimately this is done by teaching children compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, age-old lessons that can be paramount to our personal happiness and sometimes slip through the cracks in education and at home.
OMTimes: What does gratitude mean to you now?
Scarlett Lewis: When I think about my life on December 13th, when I think about the things I complained about, when I think about my frame of mind and about the little stuff that I let 
become big (and I was actually pretty good about keeping things in perspective, and I am optimistic and resilient and all that) but I look back on December 13th, and I realize what I didn’t realize then was a that my life was perfect! There were no problems, none!
If I had only realized that then, if I had only known then what I know now… people don’t have to go through tragedy to know that. They can just look at me and use me as perspective, and a lot of people do. A lot of people came up in line and were crying, and we were hugging, and they said “I am gonna go home and hug my six-year-old” and I said: “Beautiful! Do it!”
I have a friend who is a single mom, and she had a heart transplant and almost died (she always had issues with her heart), and I remember that she called me on my fortieth birthday to wish me a happy birthday, and I said: “I am not celebrating this year, I am forty, I didn’t think my life would be as it is, this wasn’t my expectation, and I have decided I am no longer going to celebrate birthdays”. She got mad and said: “Every year you live is a gift, and it’s a celebration, and you had better celebrate it. Every year I am alive, and I never know when I am going to die, I cherish that year, and I celebrate, and you should celebrate every single year too!” I responded: “You are so right! I will always celebrate every single year as a gift”.
OMTimes: Thank you so much, Scarlett, for sharing these profound experiences with us. Is there something you would like to leave us with?
Scarlett Lewis: Yes, thank you for giving me this opportunity – Jesse’s message of Nurturing Healing Love is a very powerful and profound formula for choosing love. Nurturing means – loving kindness and gratitude + Healing means – forgiveness + Love is – compassion in action = Choosing love.
Jesse shows us a great example of courage – the ultimate definition of courage is when we lay our lives down for our friends. Hopefully, we will never be called to do something like that, but we all have the courage that Jesse showed in his last few minutes when he was instrumental in saving 9 of his classmate’s lives, within us. It is the courage to be grateful when we are in a difficult situation, the courage to forgive – especially when the person who hurt us isn’t sorry, and the courage to go beyond empathy – when we identify with another’s pain into actively doing something to help ease that pain.
I am currently developing a social and emotional/character values program for kid’s pre-K 12th-grade based on the latest neuroscience and brain research that teaches kids to choose love in any situation or circumstance based on Jesse’s message and example of courage. It centers around the thought that even though you can’t always choose what happens to you, you can always choose how you respond. You can always choose love.
The program will be available on the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement website – Jesse Lewis Foundation and will be FREE! This will help fulfill one of the foundation’s goals of making sure that every child has access to social and emotional learning.
There are over 30 years of scientific research that proves that social and emotional learning (SEL) is the most powerful and proactive mental health initiative there is and cultivates resilience, optimism, and connection in children along with a whole host of other benefits including better grades, less anxiety, less substance abuse, less violence and incarceration, higher graduation rates and increased general well-being just to name a few.
I have been become a leading advocate of SEL and introduced the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educator’s Act into the US Senate last April. I have also headed an SEL Awareness Week in the state of Connecticut two years in a row (the next one is 7/7-14/16), and I am meeting with Obama’s domestic policy team next month to discuss addressing our children’s social and emotional needs. I believe that if the shooter, in our case Adam Lanza, had access to this essential learning, the tragedy would never have happened, and a state report came out in support of that claim.
Interview of Scarlett Lewis by Dirk Terpstra From Soullove.com
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