Give way to light

A child's song, a night of tragedy

View from the Musée d’Orsay November 2015

It is the end of the day, and a small group of kids mill peacefully about in the high-ceiling, many-windowed room they sometimes visit at this mostly outdoor nursery school. The walls are gently stippled in pink and yellow paint. The toys are all wood or felt. They are each intently absorbed in the varied tasks before them, all of them wearing some stripped-down version of the elaborate winter gear they usually wear to withstand the elements of an Upstate New York winter. My own son is one of these—three years old and determined to finish moving a magnetic ball through a maze with a magnetic wand. He ignores me as I sit down on a child-sized stool and Kerstin turns to me.

I’ve already messaged her that I’m writing an essay about this song, and she says she has a story for me. The song, Down with Darkness, comes from a Waldorf songbook and hasn’t always been part of the nursery school’s song repertoire. It first caught Kerstin’s eye because it is in a minor key—something that rarely happens with children’s songs. Kerstin introduced the song as part of the annual Lantern Festival, in which the children of the school and their parents gather in the dark of a November night to sing songs by the light of homemade lanterns.

The kids liked the song, she says, but it wasn’t until one year, shortly after she’d introduced it, that it became beloved.

It was November 13, 2015, and Kerstin says that night, at the Lantern Festival, the children sang Down with Darkness with a fervor she hadn’t heard before. She was surprised and delighted by their passion. That year, the celebration was everything Kerstin wanted it to be—the beautiful lanterns, the collection of wonderful children, the support of the small and kind community. She came home feeling buoyed by all of this beauty and togetherness. Then she switched on the news.

I've suppressed my memories of being in Paris during the attacks up until this moment. But sitting on that very small stool in that beautiful room, surrounded by busy children, Kerstin begins to cry and my own memories come so quickly I can hear the subway train rush of them as they slide into place.

My husband and I are living in San Francisco but working in Paris for the month. I have one day left at my job before I enroll in a full-time language school. To celebrate, we’re eating in a very small restaurant in our favorite neighborhood with two of my coworkers. We debate trying the more famous and popular place around the corner, Le Petit Cambodge, but agree that it will be too busy and we likely won’t get a seat. Not long into dinner, we hear a great number of sirens and then nothing. The flashing lights of the vehicles strobe into the restaurant. The waitress casually walks to the front, draws the blinds, and then deadbolts the door. The gentle chatter in the restaurant pauses.

For a long time that night, we don’t know exactly what’s happening. Our waitress fills our wine glasses to the top and assures us everything is fine but that we’re not allowed to leave. We heard sounds of footsteps running on the roof over our heads and the occasional quick blip of a siren. Slowly, information began to trickle in via frantic texts from co-workers and loved ones who are back home and watching the news.

The waitress pushes us out sometime around 4am even though we beg her not to. “You can’t stay here,” she says matter-of-factly, physically shepherding us outside. I feel ashamed for being scared when she is so clearly not. On the street, we turned away from the sirens and walked through the cold night, chatting nervously. We quickly realize we can’t cross Canal Saint-Martin to return to our apartment just on the other side. All the bridges are closed, the cabs have seemingly evaporated, and the ones we do spot wouldn't pick anyone up. The shooters are still on the loose. Could we be them? We begin to walk so quickly that we sometimes break into a run. We don’t know where we’re going, just that we need to go.

Kerstin tells me, as I’m remembering the survivor in the silver trauma blanket, the yellow emptiness of the streets, the sound of my own heart in my ears, that back in New York, one by one, the parents who had been at the Lantern Festival called her. They, too, had felt the whiplash of the beautiful evening and the horrifying news, but more than that, they had felt what she had—the sense that the children had channeled something greater than themselves when they sang Down with Darkness. Tears roll down Kerstin’s cheeks. The children in the room with us don’t look up from their blocks and books and puzzles.

I think about the days after the attack—the seeming constant sound of sirens, the feeling of wanting to jump out of my skin at every moment, and the grief as the full story of the attacks came into increasingly sharper focus. I think about how our French friends carried on, but I could barely bring myself to step outside to get a handful of groceries every few days. I left Paris, my favorite city in the world, and I haven’t been back. I buried it all.

But now I know that, at some point in that night, maybe when Oli and I were huddled in the restaurant, or running through the streets or begging a cab driver through a barely cracked window to take us the very long way home, there was a group of small children standing in a park I’d never been to, singing a song that I’d never heard but that would someday come to mean a great deal to me.

That one day, I would stand in that park and hold my own children’s hands and sing it with all of my heart. And it might feel something like healing.

Down with darkness
Up with light.
Up with sunshine,
Down with night.
Each of us is one small light,
But together we shine bright.

Go away darkest, blackest night.
Go away. Give way to light.