Editor’s note: This editorial originally ran in fellow CNHI paper the Rockwall County, Texas, Herald-Banner.
The waters came swiftly, and they left scars that will not easily heal.
What was supposed to be a season of joy at Camp Mystic — an all-girls summer camp nestled in the Texas Hill Country — turned into one of the most painful chapters in recent memory. Flash floods tore through central Texas, washing homes from their foundations and turning quiet creeks into deadly torrents.
More than 100 lives have been lost. Among them 28 children. Ten girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic are still missing.
When families were allowed to return, they walked slowly through debris, stepping around waterlogged mattresses, broken furniture and the shattered remains of a summer cut short.
One girl carried a bell. A man searched the riverbank, looking beneath rocks and in clumps of trees. A teenage girl sat in the back of a car — tears on her cheeks, gazing out the window at the devastation as her family drove away.
There are no words that can make sense of this grief.
But there are gestures — quiet ones — that have filled the silence: hands held in prayer, embraces shared in muddy fields, volunteers showing up in droves. Across the Hill Country and beyond, Texans have shown what it means to carry one another through loss.
The heartbreak is far from over and many families still wait for answers. But even in the face of uncertainty, the people of Texas have once again demonstrated what holds this state together — resilience and compassion.
In the days since the storm, first responders and volunteers have worked through exhaustion and danger. Local churches have become shelters. Community members have stepped forward with food, dry clothes and boats.
And throughout it all, the common thread has been care — strangers comforting strangers, parents holding onto each other just a little tighter, survivors clinging not only to one another but to the memory of what was lost.
There will be time in the days and weeks ahead for reflection and recovery but for now, we simply mourn. We grieve for the children whose summers were stolen, for the parents who waited too long for news and for the communities trying to piece themselves back together.
Texas will endure. As it always does.
But it does so now with a heavy heart, and a promise that no life lost will be forgotten and no family will be left to grieve alone.