I am no stranger to grief. In fact, I have waded through a fair amount of it. I have held the hand of my grieving 10-year-old daughter as she mourns her losses. I have seen the way grief has incapacitated Amy as she refuses to acknowledge its presence. So I am no stranger to grief.


All the more reason I continue to be surprised by how emotional I have been today over these Virginia Tech shootings. Is it because I have college age kids? Is it because I am a sap for kids in general? Is it because I am a half-century old? Because I have been waking up too early and losing sleep? Because I have learned to (hopefully appropriately) wear my emotions on my sleeve to model them for those who don’t know what to do with them? Or maybe because I work so hard to allow parents to feel the emotions that so many other people tell them are "not appropriate"?


As I mentioned in my previous blog, I have been hounding my kids today. I have hugged Beth all day, and called and emailed the college kids. I called Steph again as I was driving Beth to swim practice. This time my message was emotional… and Steph called me back quickly.


Ironically, she was relieved to learn I was dissolving into tears by just thinking about the tragedy. She said now she didn’t feel so weird—because she was too. (Actually, she said, "Now I know where I got it!") She was struggling to understand how some of her classmates could talk about the Virginia tragedy in the same sentence as what they were having for dinner… whereas she was substantially derailed by the event. And she’s at a solid Christian campus.


I spoke about the Bell curve in a previous blog… and I guess this is yet another example of that curve. On one side are people like Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, who have no concept or no concern about how their actions impact people around them. On the other end are people like Steph and me and many of my compassionate friends—who are profoundly impacted by events even when those events don’t directly impact our families. And in the middle are people who feel empathy for those directly affected but are not feeling much personal pain. Steph and I decided that while the pain is uncomfortable in the here-and-now, we’d rather be emotional people than wired like Amy who has successfully prevented herself from feeling much of any emotion at all.


Check out this article on PTSD... you can bet the Virginia Tech students and staff will be experiencing it.