Ten years ago this May I sat in the Morton Meyerson Symphony Hall for my daughter’s baccalaureate service when my son started texting furiously.
“Bad manners,” I thought. Then he showed me the texts.
His father’s primary home on the Blanco River had been destroyed by floods. His father, stepmother, and three half siblings had escaped, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, moments before the house collapsed under the weight and force of the water. It had happened in a flash.
The coming days revealed the extent of the devastation, property damage, lives and innocence lost. In the days after, the media covered the floods extensively. USA Today ran a story which included a photo of a sofa, the very one my ex-husband and I fought over in our divorce, perched precariously in a tree hundreds of feet from where his home once stood.
The weeks and months passed, and the news cycle changed, but the grief remained. It remains. They survived the flood, but it forever changed their lives.
The morning of July 4, the People Newspapers team was out in the community on a parade float and in the Centennial Park booth. The crowd was celebratory, engaged, and unaware of the tragedy unfolding 290 miles southwest of our bubble. Within hours, we were collectively grieving.
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Park Cities
Where the Park Cities Stay Connected.
Incomprehensible tragedy such as the Kerrville flood touches everyone in some way. It’s human nature to care about others. When that tragedy hits your own community, the pain hits hard. The pall of grief in our community is palpable. And so is the compassion shown and felt by residents.
As your local newspaper, People Newspapers not only tells your stories, we feel them, too. Some of us live here, others have worked for the newspaper for decades and feel deeply connected to this special part of Dallas and the Park Cities. We walk alongside you in your catastrophes and your celebrations.
This will be a long news cycle. We invite you to share your stories with us your way and in your own time. Our website has a tab to submit a story idea when you’re ready.
In the meantime, Park Cities resident and Licensed Social Worker Honey Owens, whose practice emphasizes trauma and grief, shared this helpful counsel.
“Grief is very personal and raw and messy. Our job as a community is to do our best to take care of ourselves, so that when our friends, neighbors, and loved ones are ready for support, we can support them because we have supported ourselves.”
Honey adds, “Even as a bystander, grieving is a normal and healthy place to be when something this big and this widespread happens.” You don’t have to be directly impacted by tragedy to grieve. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.
Summer will soon end. Classrooms will reconvene with fewer students in our schools. Holidays will come, and loved ones will be missed. Waves of grief will continue to swell and so must our compassion and care.
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