The new address is britalit.org. It’s not set up yet, but there will be no more updates at the Eruantale location. Thanks, Shawna, for all you’ve done to help and host me the past several months.

I’m back from working at camp all summer. Despite the rain nearly every day, I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot about kids, too. Mostly I learned that they don’t know as much as I thought they did. It became quite clear to me why I’m studying to teach secondary school. The first night of camp, I asked my girls to “get horizontal in bed,” and when I got frustrated that nobody was following directions, my co-cabin leader had to explain that that meant to lie down.

Working at camp has helped me deal with losing Austin as well. In my cabin one week, I had a girl who had been molested by a boy a couple years older than she, a girl whose father had died in a car accident, a girl whose brother was manslaughtered at the babysitter’s, and two sisters who had moved out of an abusive home into one with their only slightly more stable grandparents. These girls were all under twelve years old, and most were under ten. The horrors in their lives surpass those in mine, and the responsibility to guide and protect them for one week was truly humbling. Read the rest of this entry »

My cousin was one of the students killed at Virginia Tech yesterday.

26,000 students at Virginia Tech. 33 killed. That’s .12% percent. How her? Why her?

She was beautiful. Athletic. Earned straight A’s all through school. Triple-majored. Planned to study overseas several semesters. She could have changed the world. How her? Why her?

Her parents did everything to ensure her health and safety. Even as a teenager, she was allowed to drink only two caffeine-free diet sodas a week and had to split her Little Debbie snack cake with her brother. She wanted to go to school in Boston, but her parents tried to protect her by keeping her close to home. How her? She was the perfect candidate for a long, healthy life. Why her?

There’s no song to fit this emotion. There are plenty of songs about illness and death, some about car or plane accidents and death, but not even the creative types want to approach this. Of course. What consolation can they give? Someone wanted my cousin to die. Someone wanted my cousin to die so much that he put forth the effort to make it happen, that he was willing to die in the process. There were no beautiful goodbyes, no dear-mother,-the-struggle-is-over-nows. There were just generic had-a-bad-days. There were just hours of anxious search with no happy ending. There were just my aunt and uncle seeing pictures of her from her shoulders up, grateful that at least her face wasn’t destroyed, at least she died quickly from that bullet in her chest. There was just death. How her? Why her?