Editorial: What guides us in our response to tragedy?

How do we respond? What can we say? What should come next?

As violence again has torn through one of our communities, we struggle to know just how to thoughtfully and respectfully react.

Less than two years ago we faced this when four students were slain at Marysville Pilchuck High School by a fellow student who then took his own life.

Mukilteo now mourns the deaths of three Kamiak High School grads — Anna Bui, Jordan Ebner and Jacob Long, each just 19, who were just beginning their adult lives, allegedly at the hands of fellow Kamiak graduate, in the early morning just more than a week ago.

During recent tragedies elsewhere in the country and the world there has been criticism of those, most specifically lawmakers, who used Twitter to express their “thoughts and prayers.” The criticism may be valid when that’s the full extent of the comfort and support offered to those families and communities victimized by violence, but it still seems less than generous to fault that response when we all search for the right words after tragedy.

Sincerity counts. “Thoughts are prayers” will seem hollow when it’s a rote response offered without the recognition of the loss suffered.

Grace matters, too.

Mukilteo Mayor Jennifer Gregerson, herself a Kamiak graduate, sought to protect the families and friends of the victims and her community. As media attention was focused on her city, she asked, as Herald Columnist Julie Muhlstein noted, for “a little grace and a little space.”

Grace also means not expecting people to conform to how we might react ourselves, giving them the space to grieve and respond as they best see fit.

Just days after the October 2014 shootings at Marysville Pilchuck High School, two parents who lost children two years earlier in the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, talked with Herald reporters. Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden each lost a son in the shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Both came to Washington in October 2014 to support that fall’s Initiative 594, the successful measure that expanded background checks for firearm sales in the state.

Hockley’s advice, as reported then by Muhlstein, was to let people find their own path in grieving.

“Not everyone is going to grieve the same way. Some will focus on how to make a difference. Some will focus on getting back to normal. As people decide their different ways forward, accept that no two paths are the same.”

Hockley and Barden sought to make a difference, helping establish Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization that continues to work to prevent gun-related deaths caused by crime, suicide and accidents. The group works locally and nationally on education efforts, community organizing, promoting mental health and gun safety programs and advocating for state and federal policy on mental illness, gun safety measures and more.

Others are finding purpose in reaching out to those communities who themselves have been confronted by such violence.

Just as Hockley, Barden and others from Newton reached out to comfort and advise the Marysville and Tulalip communities after the high school shooting, city and school leaders from here reached out to those in Roseburg, Oregon, following the shooting deaths of nine people at Umpqua Community College in October 2015, which occurred as Marysville and Tulalip prepared to mark the passage of a year since the shootings here.

Responding to these tragedies is a long process.

Newton is preparing to open a new Sandy Hook Elementary School, replacing the school torn down after 20 first-graders and six educators were massacred by a gunman in December 2012. The school offered an open house to the public a month before the start of school to allow students and parents a “quiet, respectful and appropriate opening.”

Earlier this spring, ground was broken for a new cafeteria at Marysville Pilchuck High School, replacing the site of the massacre. Understandably absent from the ceremony was one student who was wounded in the gunfire but survived his injuries. “He’s really struggling a year and a half later,” said the young man’s grandfather, but “I had to come. This here is a little bit of medicine.”

It’s still not easy to know what to say, what to do, but it helps to be guided by recognition of the loss, respect for the process of grieving and grace for all involved.