Muted Emotions

Sandy Hook School in Newtown, CT

I woke up this morning and the emotional enormity of what happened in Newtown, Connecticut finally hit me - 24 hours after the event.

President Barack Obama wipes tears

from his eyes while addressing the

nation following the Newtown, CT

school shooting on December 14, 2012.

Despite having watched a great deal of the coverage and watching President Barack Obama deliver emotional remarks from the White House while wiping tears from his eyes and fighting to control his emotions, my emotions didn't fully manifest themselves until this morning.  This morning, when I turned on follow-up coverage and listened to the latest information and saw many of the same photos from the day before and found myself doing, a day later, what the president of the United States did at the White House. I wiped quiet tears from my eyes.

At that moment, it hit me that in my more than two decades working in the news business, I had pretty much trained myself to almost completely suppress emotional reactions to news events, no matter how bad they may be.

My thoughts and prayers have been with the people of Newtown, particularly with the families of those whose children and relatives were killed, since I learned of the event.  I don't have kids of my own, so I really can't imagine the pain of any of them.  But, I do have a niece in high school in Detroit.  I am grateful that she attends one of the best high schools in the Detroit Public School system.  But as we have all seen, events like yesterday's can happen anywhere.  My niece is a sweet, sensitive, smart, funny, athletic, beautiful, innocent teenager.  Just thinking that something like the Newtown shooting could happen at her school brings tears to my eyes and gives me a mere glimpse of what families in Newtown are probably feeling.

If I could, I'd go hug my niece right now. Since I can't, I'll trust that my sister, her mother, did it for me.