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