This morning, my children are safe and in school. But before I dropped them off, I read about four children who have died. One death was buffered by time, another was agonizingly fresh, and two more happened on a preschool bus in Carollton, Kentucky. These losses rattled me, not because they were mine, but because in my bipolar brain, there is only a short walk between the things I fear and the things that others live.

Each loss calls to mind another. I think about my best friend’s little sister, who died at fifteen, and I remember a student of mine whose son narrowly escaped drowning.… Read the rest