I don't know, and neither do the children of Newtown who joined singer songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, know, the shadow the murder of their young fellow pupils, friends and neighbors will have on them but the darkness of this desperate horror has faded on my imagination so much in the past couple of months and I am guessing it has beatly even scratched the surface of their psyche.

The problem with death that touches us this deeply is the inability to rationalize it. It's God's will will only take you so far because the other side of his will is his won't and after you've blamed a lone gun man and arms control and our rational horror what do we tell children, six year old kids who can scarsely figure out what being alive means, that now they must figure their own imminent demise.

This is not the picture of innocence here, not any more,. More, indeed much more, than sexual innocence is the world where  life is eternal, where a child is innocent of its end, of any end. That of all the fears, nothingness shouldn't be one of them. Do you remember how you figured out death? It is fuzzy in my memory, I know a family friend died when I was maybe four years old, and by the time I was ten years old, the dead bodies were piling up. But I can't remember where I stopped thinking of death as something that happened to them and instead something that was going to happen to me.

These children are special but not in a way you want to be special and here, singing with Ingrid Michaelson, they are unspooling a sense of the damage that can be done to people and the resilience of the human spirit. But the choice is a song of escape. "Over The Rainbow" is a dream world, in the movie "The Wizard Of Oz", Dorothy only discovers there's no place like home when she is in OZ, singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", she is in flight from home. A flight that makes sense because what the children are doing is using music to help heal their wounds. Imagining a world where ultimate horros aren't daily occurences. The horror here is that the reverb from their schoolmates murder is still waiting somewhere in a file in their brain filed under open and look at your own peril.

The thing about faith is that while it might be a choice (a choice 90% of the world faiths in one sense or another) it is not a choice for children. It is difficult enough to navigate a sense of the self, a very fragile concept we are not actually born with (we think we are part of our mothers), it is much worse to do so with a sense that that sense of self is ephemeral: we are a pop song born to be forgotten. A god is the paradigm with which we deal with an everlasting sense of self.

But for children it is, for the most part, conceptual. When we lose the concept in a reality where our peers are dead, it becomes too real. It isn't that we will one day leave everything and everyone and  completely alone go to heaven, it is that it could happen at any time. 

Trying to deal with dying is a suckers game but it is inevitable that we would fuss and fidgit at it: of all the things that separates us from animals, it is one of the biggest. The glory of faith is it ends the questioning and replaces it with ceremonies. Fair enough as far as I'm concerned. But the children here replaced it by a type of escape that embraces a huge paradox. Life goes on. 

The version the Newton Children's Choir performs is in debt to Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's ukulele licked Hawaiian version, a dream of escape placed upon a paradise.