Relieved it's over

They don’t teach you this stuff at Mom and Dad School.
It was Friday morning when we awoke to news on the radio that one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing had been killed in a shoot-out with police in Watertown, Mass.
When you have a daughter living in Watertown, that news gets you out of bed in a hurry.
Muttering expletives, I scurried down to my study and checked email.
There, I found a note from Maggie, written at 1:15 a.m., letting us know that she and her husband Josh were okay.
I immediately wrote back and told her we’d call that morning, then I turned on the TV.
Maggie, not surprisingly, was wide awake when she got my email about 6:15 a.m. She and Josh hadn’t gotten much sleep that night. In fact, Josh hadn’t gotten any at all.
She immediately wrote back, and it was while I was reading her response, which included a pretty detailed description of the events just outside their apartment house, that I had what could only be described as a surreal experience.
As I read, I glanced away from the computer to check out CNN.
What I saw was the apartment house where Maggie and Josh live. It was a scene from right after the shoot-out, and a policeman was running past the house.
By then, I couldn’t possibly have been more awake.
A minute later Connie was at the computer, reading Maggie’s chilling — to a parent, at least — account. When she was finished, the two of us stared at the TV with our jaws down and our blood pressure up.
And then the same clip was shown: Darkness, a policeman, and a house that had to be theirs.
The rest of the morning is a blur. We called about 7:30 a.m. and were only minimally reassured by what we heard.
The lockdown had begun. Information was in bits and pieces and often contradictory. The sun was just coming up, and there was no way of knowing whether the second suspect was a mile away or hiding in the backseat of Josh’s car.
But the important thing was that the kids were all right.
Daughter Emily and her husband Mike and our grandson live in Alston, another one of those metropolitan Boston communities like Cambridge and Newton. They were 20 minutes away from things, but they were under lockdown as well.
Connie stayed glued to the TV, while I went off to work and put in an astoundingly unproductive morning.
Every minute or so, I’d check another news website or the AP wire, seeking scraps of information. And hoping — like about a million people in Boston and millions more across America — that police would catch this guy quickly.
We called again at noon — thankful that Maggie and Josh still had a landline — and received another round of reassurances. Everyone was exhausted and jittery and anxious. But everyone was okay.
The afternoon blurred again, with the repetitive nature of the not-much-new-to-report news driving us a little crazy.
By the end of the workday, the best recourse was to change the channel and try to tune the whole thing out. But we were soon sucked back in, and no one in Jay County was more relieved than we were when the second suspect was in custody.
So we called again, just to tell them how much we love them.
Helplessness had been the order of the day, and all of us agreed we never want to go through anything like that again.

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