Grief and guilt over Texas flooding deaths
The grief. The guilt. The giant fog.
Matt Collins can’t help but experience the catastrophic Texas flooding — especially the deaths of children in a sudden natural disaster — through a deeply personal lens.
“It’s hard to see this situation in Texas and not immediately go back to, ‘What was that like for me?’” said Collins, who with his wife, Macy, founded the Magnolia Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit that supports parents who lose a child.
Related: ‘Momma, I can see Jesus’
Hattie Jo Collins, Matt and Macy’s 4-year-old daughter, was one of five children and 14 adults killed March 3, 2020, when an EF4 tornado battered their home city of Cookeville, Tennessee, 80 miles east of Nashville.
This past week, Fourth of July flooding in the Texas Hill Country claimed at least 120 lives — including dozens of young campers — and sent Matt Collins’ mind racing back to the night Hattie died.
“I just imagine that there’s probably a lot of guilt that the parents have,” said Collins, whose family attends the Collegeside Church of Christ in Cookeville. “Obviously, nobody sends their kids to camp and expects floodwaters to take them away. So it’s not like the parents did anything wrong.”
“Obviously, nobody sends their kids to camp and expects floodwaters to take them away. So it’s not like the parents did anything wrong.”
But that won’t stop mothers and fathers from asking “What if?” questions.
What could I have done? Why wasn’t I there? Why did I send my daughter to camp in the first place?
In Collins’ case, he’s thought “a million times” about the way he held Hattie as the storm raged.
“I held her kind of across my body,” he recalled. “If I had held her straight up and down and kind of enveloped her, would things have been different? You kind of go through that scenario of, if I had done this and not this, what would have happened?
“And I’m sure,” he added, “there are parents that are thinking, ‘OK, we were on the edge of even sending our kid to camp, and we sent them to camp, and this happened,’ like it’s their fault.”
Matt and Macy with their late daughter Hattie Jo and her sister Lainey Mae.
It’s important, Collins believes, for grieving parents to express such thoughts out loud.
“Specifically for parents who have lost their kids, there may be a desire to kind of keep those things inside,” he said. “But I just don’t think that’s healthy or beneficial.”
The parents need people willing to listen and not express judgment, he stressed. Isolation is no recipe for healing.
Loved ones’ presence — not their “God needed an angel” platitudes — is what’s needed.
“If there is one big piece of advice that I would share with people who are trying to help families who have lost kids, it’s that they can’t,” Collins said. “You can’t fix anything, so don’t try to fix something. Don’t try to give answers to ‘Why?’ questions.”
Just be there.
Share a hug. Shed a tear. Offer a listening ear.
Grief and joy can hold hands
Like Matt and Macy Collins, Rick and Beverly Ross (no relation to this writer) know what it feels like to lose a daughter.
Jenny Bizaillion, 31, the oldest of the Rosses’ three children, died Feb. 22, 2010, at age 31. Group A strep bacteria claimed Bizaillion’s life less than three weeks after she entered the hospital with an initial flu diagnosis.
“We stood around Jenny’s bed, and — as our belief system would say — the angels swooped in and took Jenny to see the face of Jesus,” Beverly Ross said. “We left the hospital that day to go tell a 9-year-old girl her mommy was gone.
Beverly Ross
“And I went into overload at that point, learning everything I could learn about grieving children to help her,” Ross added, referring to her granddaughter Malaya, now 25 and a mother herself.
A former stay-at-home mother and later a first-grade teacher, Ross embraced a new calling as a professional counselor a few years before her daughter’s passing.
She’s the founder and executive director of Wise County Christian Counseling in Decatur, Texas, about 40 miles north of Fort Worth. She formed a grief center called Jenny’s Hope after Bizaillion’s death and co-wrote a 2020 book with her son Josh titled “Scarred Hope: A Mother and Son Learn to Carry Grief and Live with Joy.”
After a tragedy such as the Texas flooding, everyone wants answers — even if none exists.
“Our brains are not wired to understand why something like this happened,” said Ross, a Decatur Church of Christ member, “and therefore we see a lot of anger on social media and a lot of blaming.”
For children and adults overwhelmed with the trauma, Ross recommends a variety of physical, mental and spiritual coping techniques.
These are just a few: Drink plenty of water. Go on a walk. Express feelings in a journal or — in the case of a child — color a picture for a victim’s family. Pray for strength.
“This is super important, and I’ve really been doing this the last few days: Look for something in your day that you’re grateful for,” Ross said. “In every research study done, gratitude is the link for joy. … And joy is not the opposite of grief.”
As she describes it, grief and joy can hold hands.
“Grief and joy are both rooted in love,” she said. “We do not grieve what we don’t love, and joy is rooted in love. .. Joy gives us the strength to carry the pain.
“Grief and joy are both rooted in love. We do not grieve what we don’t love, and joy is rooted in love. … Joy gives us the strength to carry the pain.”
“It’s not carry the pain, and then one day you won’t have it anymore. That’s not true,” she added. “We’ve got to pray for the strength that we will learn how to continue to carry the pain.”
Romans 15:13 served as Bizaillion’s “life verse,” her mother said, and Ross has adopted it as her own: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Related: Mother, son share their journey of grief and hope
To Ross, that New Testament Scripture relates the value of trusting God “even when we didn’t get our way, and even when we’ve been ushered onto a road of darkness that we did not want or choose.”
“We’re going to trust God that the light will be at the end of this road,” she explained. “Not that we get our way, but we’re going to trust God that somewhere in Israel there is an empty tomb, and ours will be one day, and the lives of these people will be opened one day.”
‘Love, have mercy. Please’
Max Lucado, a San Antonio minister and best-selling author with 2.4 million Facebook followers, led a guided time of prayer after the flooding, which occurred about 45 minutes from his home.
In an 11-minute video on the social media site, Lucado recited the Lord’s Prayer and recalled the promise of the 23rd Psalm.
“Especially in times of challenge, disaster and difficulty, we bow on knee before you and beg for your mercy in Jesus’ name,” Lucado prayed to God.
“During our time of crisis, I believe it is important for us to begin our prayer by acknowledging our pain, acknowledging our sorrow,” the minister told the audience. “We lament as did those in Scripture who taught us to be honest about our hurts, about our sorrows.
“Sometimes we cry out to the Lord from the mountaintops,” he added. “But then there are times, like this time, when we cry out from the valley.”
His voice shaking, Lucado expressed concern and compassion for the victims’ relatives.
“Sometimes we cry out to the Lord from the mountaintops. But then there are times, like this time, when we cry out from the valley.”
“Lord, have mercy. Please,” he prayed. “It heavies our hearts to think of the parents who no longer have the children and the children who no longer have the parents.”
But he emphasized that Christians “do not grieve as those who have no hope.”
Pain still fresh, but life goes on
In the flooding’s wake, the focus will turn from the lives lost to the rebuilding of battered communities.
Matt Collins understands that.
“We need people to come and help and clean up,” he said. “That is good, and it’s beautiful.”
But statements like “We’ll come out of this stronger” never fail to irritate him.
“Unity of a city is not worth my child’s life,” Collins said. The Texas victims’ families “are not going to be better for this.”
They will, however, eventually come out of the initial fog and find a way to live again.
“There is life that exists,” he said. “We laugh every day. We have hope. We have joy. We have a purpose, and we live for that.”
But even five years later, the pain remains fresh.
“It shows itself differently,” Collins said. “We can operate. We can function. But there is sadness and grief that does exist and, I imagine, will always exist.”
“We can operate. We can function. But there is sadness and grief that does exist and, I imagine, will always exist.”
Collins always knows exactly where in life Hattie should be now.
She’d be preparing to go into the fourth grade.
“You know, I’d hate to think I wouldn’t have any grief ever again,” the father said. “I mean, how sad would it be to not grieve my daughter? I think I always will. I hope I always do.”
BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Ross writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged, where this piece originally appeared. Reach him at [email protected].
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