The things children fear....

Tonight I watched the Nightline special on the "memorial" meeting that took place in Tuscon tonight. (I watch Nightline almost every night.)

Dan Harris did a segment with school children who had written letters to Gabrielle Giffords. Kids are so cool. They tell you exactly what they are thinking. A young boy said that he was afraid the the shooter might know where his classroom was (implying that he might be able to hurt people in his class). Dan, of course, reassured the young boy that the shooter could not hurt anyone else.

It reminded me so much of my experience with Dominique almost four years ago when we discussed the Virginia Tech shooting. I received my Masters in Political Science from Virginia Tech in their On-line Masters Program. I'd been to campus a few times, and I decided to walk at graduation and take the whole family with me for this important occasion. Graduation happened less than 3 weeks after the 2007 shootings.

In April 2007, Dom would have been 9 and in the 4th grade.

We talked about the shooting, and we all wore our Hokie colors on the Friday after the shooting; I put that family picture in my graduation announcements.

(And my walls are gross and ugly here with no paint on them yet.)

Anyway....several days after the incident, Dom came home from our neighbor's house and she said, "Lisa said that the guy who killed all those people killed himself." She was noticeably relieved. I said, "Were you worried about going to campus, Dom?" She said that she was worried that the killer was still at Virginia Tech, and she was nervous to go to the graduation because of that. It struck me then that we need to give our kids "all" of the information...not just parts. I was surprised that she thought that!

It reminded me of the segment tonight on Nightline when a young boy feared that the killer in the Tuscon shootings could still somehow hurt him.

I'm always surprised at the information that kids cling to and what they fear. I felt badly that Dominique thought I would put her in harm's way. We talked for a long time as a family about the VT shootings, and we made a special point to pay our respects to the fallen when we went to campus.

Here is Dom signing the memorial board. She wrote, "I'm so, so sorry." Simple and heartfelt.

Here is the whole gang looking at the tributes to the 32 Hokies who died. That make-shift memorial has now become a permanent one.

Here is me and Domi after my graduation. She wanted to "wear the hat." We are by Lane Stadium.

There were 12 students in the International Studies/Poli-Sci Department who were slain. At the department graduation, they all received their degrees posthumously. It was the saddest thing I have ever been to. I cried and cried and cried and cried. It was so hard to be "happy" on that day...and I was because of my huge accomplishment, but it was tempered by the tragedy.



My kiddos learned a lot of lessons from the trip to campus. Some had to do with the tragedy. I'm also hopeful that they remember that the reason we took them all out there to see me graduate was to show them what a college graduation was like to inspire them to achieve that for themselves.

This is our dorky family looking every which way but at the camera! I love very single one of them, though!