As Joey Gay’s family prepares for another birthday without her, her love for all things purple continues to color the world of those who knew her – Hartford Courant

A plate of purple frosted cupcakes sat in the refrigerator in the Gay family’s Newtown home on Dec. 14, 2012, ready for a birthday party planned for the next day.

A party that would never happen.

The invitations were sent and the ingredients for another set of cupcakes had already been bought. Instead, Bob and Michele Gay braced themselves for another kind of day that would honor their daughter’s seven short years, joining 19 other sets of Sandy Hook parents in planning the funerals for the 20 first-graders killed alongside six educators in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Ten years ago, the Gays spent the day that should have been their daughter’s 7th birthday party coming to terms with the unthinkable, that their vibrant youngest daughter, who loved purple, the Baltimore Ravens, swimming and her sisters, had been murdered.

Josephine “Joey” Gay would have turned 17 this Sunday. She died just three days after her 7th birthday.

“For this to happen, period, would wreck anyone. It would just devastate any parents, any family, but it was an insult to injury that her birthday party was set for the next day and that Christmas was soon after,” said Michele Gay.

The hours, days and weeks following the shooting live in her memory as a haze of grief and pain that are still, a decade later, hard to describe. She remembers coming home that night after hours spent in a Sandy Hook firehouse waiting for the impossible news of what had happened in the school that morning and seeing the cupcakes — prepared carefully to fit Joey’s food sensitivities.

“I just remember looking at them when kind of the reality was setting in that evening,” she said. “It’s impossible to describe what it felt like that night as reality was setting in, we all describe it as just the darkest night of our lives. It just seemed impossible to move forward on that evening.”

But somehow, each December, they find a little bit of light when Joey’s birthday candles glow on another purple cake.

Before her death, Joey’s life filled the Gay family in every way with never-ending needs and her full-belly laughter. Joey, with her bowl-cut brown hair, had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, visual impairments and apraxia of speech, leaving her without words but never lacking in personality or an acute awareness of everything around her.

“Every aspect of our lives as a family was revolving around her, so for her to suddenly not be in our lives was like waking up on another planet or in a parallel universe,” said Gay as the calendar counted closer and closer to her daughter’s 17th birthday this month.

“Our lives as a family, and probably my life the most, revolved around Josephine because she was such a force,” she said. “Everything about her colored our family life, in wonderful ways and in some challenging ways.”

And she colored it purple.

From lavender to deep violet, Joey’s love of the color has continued to tint the worlds of those who knew her.

Her infectious joy still radiates through her family each December and colors her old neighborhood in Newtown, even though the Gay family has long since moved away.

Every year, Michele Gay’s phone lights up all day long on her daughter’s birthday, pictures flooding in from neighbors all along their old street, Nighthawk Lane, and from places far and wide where people honor Joey with her signature color. They tie balloons to their mailboxes, switch out the lightbulbs in their lamp posts, paint their nails and pick their clothes all to remember Joey.

“Everybody sends their pictures, wherever they are in the world,” said Michele Gay. “They’re wearing their purple, their purple manicures, everybody bombards us with all of their purple pictures around her birthday.”

And in their home where traces of Joey still fill the house, “the purple cupcakes continue.”

On Sunday, Michele and Bob and their surviving daughters Marie and Sophie will dig into another purple dessert after they spend the day together, celebrating and missing Joey.

For 10 years now, December has been a heavy month for the family.

First, they face Joey’s birthday, then the yearly remembrance of the shooting, then the holidays without their youngest daughter and sister who, without speaking, always made her thoughts known with her loud laughs and expressive sign language and pointing.

“All of the families had to move through the holidays, that first holiday, without their loved ones,” said Michele Gay, remembering the poignant pain of that first Christmas just 11 days after Joey’s death. “Although it was horribly painful, we were numb and that helped us to move through that first one right away.”

By the time December rolled around again, she’d developed a new strategy for surviving that last month of the year.

“It became just kind of consciously reframing each of these things that we would have to do without her: family vacations, birthdays, Thanksgivings, Fourth of July’s, all of those things that we would do together as a family that would now be so different.”

Continuing the traditions they shared with Joey, she said, would have been heartbreaking. Impossible. So, slowly, they made new ones.

“We started consciously choosing to create new traditions for each of those things and that has been a godsend for our family.”

For Joey’s birthday, they’ve chosen to spend the day remembering the moments they did get with her, even if they were far too few. They remember her sense of style and the fierce friendships she formed with her fellow first graders.

“She was very funny, very girly, she loved to dress up,” said Michele Gay. “And she was very social, very interactive with her peers. She had great relationships, and it was just amazing that this child who [couldn’t] speak with her peers had these great friendships. Her classmates were just amazing little people.

“She brought a lot of joy and humor, a lot of fun with her wherever she was.”

As they celebrate what would be her 17th birthday, Michele Gay said the 10-year remembrance of her death is hard not to think about.

“Those two are so tied together at this point,” she said.

Each year, all they can do is try to focus on her memory and take in all the purple that continues to color their world because of her.

“What we choose to do as a family is to really try to focus on her birthday and to let that really kind of overcome some of the difficulty of December 14th,” she said. “Just keeping her birthday and the celebration of her life as our primary focus, that’s important to us.”

As all the purple pictures arrive in her inboxes on Sunday, Michele Gay said it is both healing and hard to see the impact her daughter’s memory has on so many people a decade after her death.

“It is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time,” she said.

“It catches your breath, kind of takes the wind out of you a little bit. But more and more as the years go by, those tears of pain kind of transition to tears of joy and remembrance, and all of those memories start to overtake the heartbreak, little by little.”

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