Oh, Virginia.

The photos of college students, children really, are flashing across my television screen as names of those killed are read, little tidbits of their lives revealed and emailed prayers shared. My heart is aching.

When I see these students, earnest and emotional, victims and survivors, I relate to them. I remember what it felt like to be so young and feel so worldly, to have so much potential and feel like there was all the time in the world to realize every single dream. I sat in classrooms, doodling and daydreaming, absorbing French and just trying to make it through a term of geometry. I walked confidently across my campus, making my home in classrooms and student newsrooms, in buildings that housed generations before me and in the close quarters of my apartments and dorm rooms. I couldn't wait for summer break and I made plans to be a camp counselor and an intern, and I couldn't bear the thought of saying good-bye to my friends until the next fall. I was always in love with someone rather undeserving of or uninterested in my bundles of attention and I was incurably busy in all corners of campus and in organizations and groups that met the many parts of my ever-evolving personality and passions. I was like them.

Like them, but without a cell phone or the terror. I had my own complex existence on a campus where violence happened behind doors but I was fortunate that the trauma was not in the hallways, in the classroom next door, hanging from the windows on one very unsuspecting spring morning.

Like them, the hardest moments, the most blind-siding trauma of my life took place in Virginia. Five years later, I fight the feelings I have for the entirety of a state that almost claimed the life of my brother when he made a simple mistake on a motorcycle that sent him off a country road and into a deep and troubling coma. We were lucky and he is OK, and when I visit him in Virginia, my heart pulls tight inside my chest to be so close to that specific pain. I imagine there are students and professors and maintenance workers and cafeteria attendants and strangers across the country who feel a sadness in this state that I hate to understand.

I can't help but go to that place and to find myself -- even for a moment -- in their faces. Those college hopes and mistakes and laughs and living really wasn't that long ago and there is this deep need to connect. Through familiar ways of being. In college, in life, in a national sadness for horrifying moments when the world goes all wrong. Through prayer, through grief, through fear, through politics and rage, through all the explanations and why why whys.

I see so much in those university students, so in their lives, and my heart aches for them. My heart aches with them.

With each photo of each smiling person now dead, I can't help but to see them as a child of some grieving family. And I can't help but to see a pause in my dreams for my own child, for the boy I dream will discover himself and a great big, wonderful world of possibility that begins opening in a music hall, on a basketball court, in an engineering lab, in an art studio or wherever his gifts and curiosities take him. I pause to hold tight to the hope that he will be safe from jolts of uncontrollable violence, that he will find sanctuary in his education. Not fear. Please, God, not fear.

My mother has said many times that we all have small moments in our lives that cause us to step over the line from child to adult. Holding my boy close to my body, close enough that I can hear both of our hearts, I am grateful for the normality of just another day in his childhood. I grieve for those students who've unwillingly, courageously crossed the line and for those who've died on the way.

Oh, Virginia. Just a day ago, we were so naive to how much it could hurt, for how much it could make us hold tight to what we have.