Nurturing healing love

Scarlett Lewis doesn't talk about her son in the past tense. Jesse "is," not "was."

Not only is he ever present in his mother's thoughts, she believes he set the direction for the rest of her life in three words he wrote on the kitchen chalkboard on the morning of Dec. 14, 2012: "Norurting Helin Love" (Nurturing Healing Love).

"A 6-year-old wouldn't write those words," Lewis says.

She saw them much later as she left her home with clothes in hand for Jesse's funeral.

"I knew he had just handed me a torch. This was going to be my life's passion."

That's why Lewis started the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation and the reason she's been invited to speak at the TEDx Fayetteville: Mind Shift event Friday morning at the Walton Arts Center.

Founded in 1984, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a series of global conferences created around the motto "ideas worth spreading." Local TEDx events can be organized by anyone who obtains a license from TED.

"This is the third event in Northwest Arkansas," says spokeswoman Joan Johnson. "The first was in Bentonville, 2012, and the second last spring, 2013, in Fayetteville. The speakers are all affiliated with Northwest Arkansas and have wonderful stories to share in 15 minutes or less."

Scarlett Lewis is related to the Lewises who started the Bank of Fayetteville and Lewis Ford. Born in Fayetteville, she graduated from Boston University with a bachelor's degree in communications in 1990. She has worked in journalism and investments, including a stint at Alice Walton's Llama Company.

"We reached out to Scarlett because her idea about compassion is worth sharing, her personal story is moving, and she is one of our own Fayettevillians," says Brent Robinson, co-chairman of this year's event.

"Every time I talk, people say they are profoundly changed," Lewis says. "I'm thankful, because that's my purpose in life."

Dec. 14, 2012

Lewis describes her younger son, then a first-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., as "a big bundle of energy."

"He liked riding horses (and) riding on the back of his brother's ATV," she remembers. "He loved playing with his little army men. I'd just gotten him a swing set with a fort for his birthday the previous June, and he loved playing there. We had a trampoline, and I'd jump with him, and we'd wrestle -- and then we'd lie on it exhausted, looking up at the clouds."

Dec. 14, 2012, seemed like a normal Wednesday. Lewis was at work when a friend called to tell her there had been a shooting at a Newtown school.

"I didn't think it was Jesse's. I didn't think anything could ever happen to Jesse -- just like everybody thinks that," Lewis says. "When another friend called to tell me they were releasing the kids, and parents were supposed to meet them at the firehouse, I just expected to walk in and pick up Jesse."

When she arrived, Lewis saw "media trucks, army trucks, helicopters flying overhead, and I thought, 'What the heck is going on? Is this necessary?' The firehouse was swarming with kids, and I just kept looking for my little brown head."

But Jesse never appeared.

"I kept being told, 'They're still sweeping the school; he could be hiding,'" she remembers. "And I thought, 'Of course. Jesse's so scrappy, he's taken a bunch of kids out in to the woods. It could be hours before we find them.'

"In hindsight," Lewis says, "it

NAN Our Town on 04/10/2014