Every conversation, no matter the subject, inevitably turns now to the unfathomable tragedy still unfolding in the Hill Country, along and near the banks of the Guadalupe River. Because sooner or later, it seems, we’re all discovering we’re somehow connected to someone who lost someone this weekend. Even if that just means we’re bound up in the same shock and grief, a big state made smaller in mourning.
As of the time of this writing, among the more than 100 confirmed dead are at least seven children from Dallas or the Park Cities. They are 9-year-old Lila Bonner and her best friend, 10-year-old Eloise Peck, both of whom just finished second grade at John S. Bradfield Elementary School. And 13-year-old Blair Harber and her 11-year-old sister Brooke, who were recovered 15 miles from Kerrville, their hands clasped. And 8-year-old twins Hanna and Rebecca Lawrence, who attended University Park Elementary. And 9-year-old Janie Hunt, great-granddaughter of William Herbert Hunt.
There’s also 8-year-old Hadley Hanna of Dallas, who remains among the unaccounted for, and so many other children not yet found.
There are the adults, too, including Blair and Brooke’s grandparents, Mike and Charlene Harber, with whom the girls had been staying in a cabin along the river. The Harbers are late 1960s graduates of my alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School, whose alumni took to Facebook over the weekend to offer prayers for and memories of the couple.
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As of Monday afternoon the Harbers remained among the missing, as did Tanya and Jeff Ramsey, who’d been camping in an RV park swallowed by floodwaters. Countless mutual friends have spent the last several days posting photos of the Flower Mound couple on social media.
A crew of firefighters from Ciudad Acuna, left, aid in search and rescue efforts near the Guadalupe River after a flash flood swept through the area, Monday, July 7, 2025, in Ingram, Texas. (AP Photo/Eli Hartman)(Eli Hartman / AP)
It’s our inclination to turn away from tragedy when it doesn’t enter our home, to let it be someone else’s problem — someone else’s misery. Especially when it happens over there, hundreds of miles from our backyards. We’re seemingly overwhelmed now with headlines bearing unimaginable nightmares, horror stories too incomprehensible to process. It’s far easier to snap off the television and lay down the phone and pretend it didn’t touch us.
Yet it did. It does.
Monday morning, one of my dearest friends — and my son’s pediatrician — told me his group treats three of the children claimed by the floodwaters. He told me he has tried to watch the news in “doctor mode,” but that one listen to Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge” shattered that dispassion. Especially the line, “Let the buildings keep our children dry.”
Another close friend shared an email that arrived on Sunday from Joan Buchanan Hill, head of school at The Lamplighter School, which said, “A number of Lamplighter families — past and present — consider [Camp Mystic] a second home, and several had children in attendance during the flooding.” The email contained resources that will help parents, like my friend, talk to their children about the friends who won’t be returning to school in a few weeks.
Pastoral staff at several Dallas houses of worship are holding vigils or preparing for funerals, among them a fellow Dallas Morning News contributor, the Rev. Joshua Whitfield, the pastor at St. Rita’s Catholic Community, where Blair and Brooke Harber attended church. They will have to help those families, and their communities, bear the weight of the unceasing grief.
Because we have suffered an unimaginable loss — all of us, all at once.