The night right before I moved into Grant South freshman year, I was sitting in my hotel room when I got a call from a friend back home.

Nervous about my transition into college, it was relieving to see a familiar name on my caller ID, but what he was about to tell me was far from relief. One of my friends from back home had committed suicide.

He had gone to junior high with me. As an intimidated sixth grader, he made me feel accepted when he, an eighth grader, was handing out pieces of gum to people on our soccer team and gave me a piece. “Here ya’ go, I guess you’re cool enough,” he jokingly said. As insignificant of a statement as it was, it stuck with me as my first memory of our friendship.

Now I was hearing that my friend, a nice and normal guy, was gone.

I didn’t know what to do; I wasn’t able to go home to the St. Louis area four hours away. I wasn’t able to talk to friends and try and make some sense out of this. It would not have mattered, though; it didn’t make any sense at all. Just like how only six months later, it wouldn’t make sense when a man would barge into Cole Hall and kill five fellow Huskies and then himself.

The same can be said about the recent Toni Keller case. It just does not make sense why these things happen, and that makes it so hard to cope with. Death is permanent; you cannot fix it. So what is there for one to do once it happens? How are you supposed to deal with all those feelings swelling up within you? Where do you direct them?

Growing up, you hear about these sorts of tragedies so much you almost become numb to them, but you also do not understand. If you are 4 years old and grandma dies, you might cry, but you do not really know why you’re sad. You do not have a concept of death.

That changes when you become an adult; you realize what that means. These things hit so close to home and everything seems so surreal after you hear the news.

Another friend of mine from back home was killed this past Monday. Again, I am faced with confusion and anguish. In no way am I the person most affected by this, but she was a nice girl I knew, who I hung out with a couple times, and that’s enough to make a person upset.

As I look on Facebook at the various statuses and discussions of what happened, I realize it is the discussion that heals. People want to know what happened, how it makes each other feel and help each other feel better. In a weird way, the tragedy ends up bringing everyone together.

Be it a small group of friends and family or an entire university, we must cope with the death of a fellow human being together.