Learn How to Cope with Fear, Danger

April 22, 2007

In the fall of 2005, my then seventeen-year-old daughter was a junior at North Mecklenburg High School. 

We had moved to Charlotte a year before, and she was feeling settled with new friends. One of those friends was killed that fall, by a gun. We spent a good deal of time talking about “bad things happening to good people,” and the lack of care taken with guns. 

In the spring, another of my daughter’s good friends was killed in a car wreck; I had no words for my daughter at that point. She created her own, writing poems remembering her two friends and sharing them with her friends’ families. 

The following summer, my then twenty-year-old daughter was invited to go to London with a family, to be a nanny. It was an all expenses paid plus salary trip, and it would be my daughter’s first time abroad. 

One week before she was to fly to Europe, the London tube was bombed. She called me from college and told me that she was afraid to go. I told her that it was a troubled world, and she would always have to be aware of her safety. 

I also told her that our family was not going to live a fearful life; we would continue going places, doing things, all the while respecting the constraints post 9/11 had imposed on us all. My daughter went to England and had a wonderful time.

This week, one of my seventeen-year-old son’s classmates at North Mecklenburg High School shot and killed himself. This event followed the massacre of 33 people at Virginia Technical University. 

My son was concerned for his classmate, the students and teachers at Virginia Tech, and for all the families impacted by this tragedy. He was also concerned about the image his school must have in the University City Area and the larger Charlotte Community. 

In the midst of all of this pain and sorrow, my son wanted everyone to know that his school is a good place, a place where some tragic events occur and many good actions take place as well.

I listened closely to National Public Radio this week to make sense of the tragedies that occurred. Dr. Joshua Sparrow, a child psychologist and author, discussed on April 20, 2007 what a college student should do in response to encountering “somebody who seems clearly mentally unhinged.” Dr. Sparrows states, “The answer is not to be paralyzed by fear, in the sense of not being able to do anything and to carefully analyze what it is within your grasp to do--and to be sure to do that.” 

I experienced sorrow and tragedy as an adolescent, but not in the global, continual, deathly way that our children and adolescents now face, all too often.  Luckily, they have help and advice like Dr. Sparrows’ available to them. 

May we all decide not to be paralyzed by fear, analyze what it is we can do, and take positive action to reach out to those in need. If we take caring and heroic steps in the face of tragedy, we can create powerful images and actions to counter the fears and horrors that enter our communities.