A school shooting leaves Zach without his older brother, Andy, forever. He becomes the “remaining child” in the family, which is plunged into great grief. The mother was Mired in grief for a long time and, guided by a strong sense of revenge, vowed to make the murderer’s parents pay dearly. Father is also involved in this incident with Andy’s classmate’s mother an unknown past love. Family crises arise, but Zach, a six-year-old boy, eventually heals himself and his family in his own way, bringing back love and understanding.
The book was inspired by a real news event — the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, USA, which killed 28 people, including the gunman, 20 of whom were children, and also left 6 adults dead, in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.
Bang, bang, bang, several shots shattered the quiet of the campus, also shattered the happy peace of Zach’s family. I couldn’t wait for Andy’s news, and I didn’t think it was the worst news I didn’t want — Andy was killed in the shooting. Mom Melissa is alone in her grief, and Dad Jim doesn’t know how to comfort his grieving wife and terrified Zach. Zac suddenly felt like the invisible person in the family. Everyone was so busy with their own sorrows that they had forgotten that he, too, was afraid and insecure. Every time he woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, he felt as if someone with a gun had come to their house and wanted to kill him.
Life goes on every day, but life never goes back. Looking at the bulletin board at home that listed everyone’s weekly to-do list, Zach felt as if time had stopped forever on the day of the shooting, and now there was nothing that everyone had to accomplish. One day, Zach walks into Andy’s closet. He suddenly realizes how big the closet is. He sits alone in the dark on Andy’s sleeping bag, and begins his healing journey as a child.
He wondered, can people really have many complex emotions at the same time? He felt that his emotions were complicated and all intertwined, making it impossible for him to think and distinguish. So he got paper and a paintbrush and drew each emotion on a separate piece of paper. Red represents loss of face, gray represents sadness, black represents fear, green represents anger, and a hollow paper frame represents loneliness. He calls this pile of paper “mood paper.” As the article says: “I waited for the mood paper to dry, then I went to the kitchen to find some tape and taped the paper to the wall of the hideout. This is a nice place. I can lie on Andy’s sleeping bag and watch the mood. Now all kinds of feelings are separated, separated, it is easier to think separately.”
Seeing this, I was really scared for Zach, but also for his unique wit and intelligence and feel gratified. And there really is evidence for healing through painting. Through Baidu search: “Painting therapy is one of the methods of psychological health counseling and treatment. In the process of painting, the painter presents the feelings and conflicts repressed in the subconscious through painting tools. At the same time, in the process of painting, the painter in mind, emotion, thought, Will get negative energy release, decompression, catharsis, adjust the mood and mentality, repair the trauma on the soul, fill the blank of the inner world, get satisfaction, sense of achievement, self-confidence, so as to achieve a good effect of diagnosis and treatment. Painting therapy does not limit the age, adults or children can get any good psychological needs through painting therapy. Painting art is a mysterious but magical language, psychological counselors can interpret the soul code of the interviewees through painting, dialysis deeply troubled people’s ‘crux’, so as to solve the problem, let the interviewees get help and relief in a certain period of time, is one of the methods of mental health recovery.” And for children, they are not yet able to express their emotions and feelings, so painting can directly touch the inner subconscious.
For Zach, it was just the first step in healing himself. And then he would go into this secret space from time to time and talk to Andy, and he would bring the Magic House books and read them here, and he would read them to Andy. He discovered four secrets about finding happiness.
The first secret of happiness: Pay attention to the little things around you. Once read a sentence: “people do not become happy, happiness is already there. People who understand this can feel happiness in everyday moments without waiting for something to be achieved.” However, we are so incapable of perceiving happiness that we are so busy with work, life and family that we don’t seem to be moved by the little things in life. The happiness we have been searching for is actually around everyone, it depends on whether you are aware of it. Many happy people do not lie in how high a position he really has, how much achievement he has, but in his willingness to pay attention to the little things around him. A smile from a stranger, an unexpected surprise, an inexplicable fine weather, a straight word read in a book, these can become our moments of happiness. However, we often fail to notice the gifts life gives us from time to time.
The second secret of happiness: curiosity. When it comes to who is the most curious person, I think children will be the champion. They were born curious about this strange world. As we grow up, we seem to lose this ability and become rigid and numb. Nothing seems to arouse our urge to get to the bottom of it. Life without curiosity will inevitably lose a little vitality and vitality, even in the adult world, quite curious people will be regarded as different, think that there is something wrong with this person’s mind, often think of some strange things.
However, these two secrets did not seem to help Zach and his family to find happiness again. Everyone was covered by sadness, and his mother even raised strong feelings of revenge. No one was in the mood to notice the beauty and curiosity around him anymore. Zach was thinking that the book wasn’t always right.
The third secret of happiness: Empathy. When reading this secret, Zach’s secret space was discovered by his father by accident, and his father also came to the closet room to listen to him read books. When Zach read about “empathy,” he asked his dad what “empathy” meant. His dad told him that to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel what they are feeling is to empathize. Zach suddenly remembered Andy, and he went to sympathize with Andy and let go of Andy’s unfriendly behavior in the past. He also thought of the shooter’s father, Charlie, the McKinley school security guard, and tried to empathize with him, and wanted his mother to do the same, but she didn’t feel the need to in the grip of hate. Zach felt that this secret was useful to him, but why didn’t Mom want to empathize?
So, in order to reconcile the animosity between his mother and Charlie, the six-year-old decided that he would go to Charlie and ask him to talk to his mother so that maybe they would stop fighting. He walked for more than an hour to reach the cemetery. He knew that Charlie would come here every night to say good night to his son. He suffered great fear and fear. When he finally met Charlie, he felt Charlie’s grief, as much as his mother’s grief, but Charlie felt that Zach’s mother would never understand him. To save Zach’s family from worry, Charlie drove Zach home.
Zach thought he had made a big mistake, but when everyone saw him come back, they calmed down and Mom offered to see his secret space. Apparently, the secret space was the first place Dad thought of when Zach went missing, so the secret became an open secret. Mom, Dad, and Zach huddled in the crowded closet. Mom looked at Zach’s mood paper, Andy and Zach’s picture together, and listened softly to Zach as he continued to read the adventures of The Amazing Tree House, where the hero eventually discovered the fourth secret to happiness.
The fourth secret of happiness: to take care of those who need you. Perhaps the opposite is also true: “If you allow others to take care of you, they will be happy too.” After going through Zach’s disappearance and exploring his secret space, Mom finally got over it, saying, “I think we’ve been dealing with…… The way your brother died and all this was wrong — we’ve been fighting each other all this time, without each other. ‘ Yes, when the family is experiencing unprecedented grief, everyone is immersed in their own grief, living life in their own way, but only forget that the family is a whole, can share the wind and rain, each other warm. At this point, the family can finally depend on each other to take care of each other. Zach finally brought love and healing to the family in his own way.
Reading this, a heart finally at ease, this is a tender story about grief and healing, hatred and forgiveness. Just like the words on the cover of the book say, “No one is strong alone. I need you wherever and whenever I can.”
