094: ‘I can’t stop thinking about those girls’: A child psychologist unpacks collective grief after the Texas flood tragedy

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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? In our recent collaboration with Fast Company, 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.

You can read the piece on Fast Company here: ‘A child psychologist unpacks collective grief after the Texas flood tragedy.’

—Cassie & Kelsey

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