In the early morning hours of high summer’s holiday, July 4, a Southern summer camp became the site of tragedy: At Camp Mystic in Central Texas, flash flooding from a rapidly rising Guadalupe River claimed the lives of 27 people, many of them young girls. Among them were eight-year-old twin sisters.
As waters rose in the middle of the night, counselors wrote girls’ names on their arms in case the worst-case scenario happened.
Some campers tried to hold hands.
Some didn’t make it.
It’s the kind of story that splits your heart open, especially if you’re a parent packing your daughter’s trunk, labeling her socks, and reminding her to write. You let your child go just a little, trusting the world to hold her.
“To any parent who sends their child to overnight camp, this is unfathomable,” says Toronto-based perinatal and child psychologist Tanya Cotler, Ph.D., who currently has two children at overnight camp. “The words ‘I can’t imagine it’ come to mind—and yet we can imagine it, and it is our greatest fear.”
One of the most common sentiments we’ve heard from parents right now is ‘I can’t stop thinking about those girls.’ But how do we sit with the pain, without letting it swallow us, and how do we stay soft without hardening when the world feels anything but safe? Here, Cotler walks us through ‘collective grief’ in parenthood, including how to channel it into healing action and support those walking through the deepest pain of all: losing a child.
Two Truths (TT): We’re seeing a lot of moms struggle with the dichotomy of witnessing this ongoing collective tragedy while also trying to be present and joyful with their children. How can we hold both?
Tanya Cotler, Ph.D. (TC): Collective grief is the emotional response that occurs when we experience a tragic event as a shared humanity. We feel sorrow as a community, as a nation, and as a world together, and that is exactly what we would expect. Even though it is so painful, it’s valid and it’s deeply human.
One of the most important things is validating and normalizing what parents are feeling so that they don’t feel shame. It’s okay to feel impacted even when you don’t know the victims personally; grief can still find its way in. That seems simple, but it’s actually one of the most important ways to cope: We cope via connection. The pain and anxiety of grief expand and multiply in aloneness. “Grieve” is a verb, and one of the necessary steps is: What can I do?
TT: Let’s follow that thread. What can we do when experiencing collective grief?
TC: We may journal to express sorrow. We might write letters—even if you don’t know a grieving parent personally—as a way to release emotions. If you know someone who has been impacted, you can reach out. The power of showing up is that we also heal in the process. We can also connect with someone who understands, or speak to a therapist who can validate how difficult it is to witness all this tragedy in our world.
We should also manage our exposure to what we’re seeing and take breaks from social media and other forms of media. Images are very hard for the mind to unsee, and watching images repeatedly on a screen can increase anxiety; you’re sitting pretty helplessly and passively just consuming.
In aloneness, these feelings grow and expand. In connection, they can settle.
We want to lean into ways to cope with that helplessness and hopefulness; that is the action-based part of grief.
Because grieve is a verb, actions are important, such as donating to relief funds, providing supplies to displaced families, and sending compassionate and loving messages to those who have been impacted. All of that can be immensely helpful, especially at times when we feel potentially helpless and hopeless.
Land of Lovies is a group that helps match children who may have lost beloved lovies with replacements provided by donors. Another group, The Lost Stuffy Project, is trying to connect with every family that’s been affected by the flooding in Texas. Losing a transitional object, such as a lovie, can be one of the most emotionally gripping experiences for a child. At an unsafe time, it can make the child feel even more unsafe, like they have lost their anchor. Being matched to help another parent find a lovie is a meaningful experience that can provide a small, tangible way to take action.
TT: How do we grapple with collective grief and the reality that we need to continue to send our children out into the world and teach them that it is a safe place?
TC: This is the space where anxiety lives: between what we can and can’t control, the known and unknown. One of the hardest parts of being human and a parent is learning how to live in the both/and, what we are able to know and what we don’t know, and what we can predict and what we cannot. We must have compassion for how hard it is to exist in this binary.
When we focus on what we can control in grief, it can ease anxiety, and that can help when we’re sending our children out into the world. Orienting in the present can be helpful. You might say, I am safe now. My children are safe now.
Rituals around routine and reunion can help; when I say goodbye to my child(ren), I say, “I will see you soon. Mommy always comes back.”
Of course, that voice in the back of your mind might be, but that didn’t happen at Mystic, and that’s where we move to grief. Guilt can emerge here, too, specifically the guilt that my child is okay, and these children were not.
Guilt gives us something to control—but by blaming ourselves, our survivorship, or our children’s, we’re misusing it. Beneath guilt is often helplessness and heartbreak. We might need to allow ourselves to just feel that, without shutting it down, and validate the feeling. Permission to feel (without trying to fix) is one of the most powerful ways to cope. We can channel this into action when we have the space and capacity.
TT: How do we connect with and support those directly impacted by this tragedy?
TC: For parents carrying the most shattering grief of all—those grieving the loss of a child—this is a pain that will forever form the fabric of their being, but they will learn to bend as they break. They will learn to soften around it.
When I support someone through the grief of losing a child, I remind them that I will continue to show up and be with them in their hardest, biggest, and most unbearable feelings.
We learn to live in moments—to help them get their feet out of bed, to help them stand up, or to eat one meal. At first, it’s how do I get through this minute, this hour, this day?
Most importantly, we let them continue to talk about the person they love and lost, to tell their story, and to be witnessed. When possible, we share our own memories of the person. We say their name. We allow the person to feel felt and known.
We are so scared as humans to say the wrong thing or to sit at the bottom of the ditch with someone who is really in pain. We want to protect the other person, we want to protect ourselves. But this is what those grieving need: They need authentic emotion; they need to be asked again and again how they are. We won’t find words to fix it—that’s why people say, “there are no words.” It’s not words that people need. In the face of unspeakable loss, our presence helps redistribute the weight of grief so it isn’t carried alone. We must remember the importance and power of bearing witness: simply being there.
To support the Texas Hill Country and all those affected, see this updated roundup of resources from Shannon Watts, organizer and founder of Moms Demand Action.
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