The Whole Picture: Grief, Healing, and Hope One Year After the July 4th Texas Hill Country Floods

By Leslie Marchand, LCSW

June 26, 2026

The Weight of What Happened

In the early morning hours of July 4th, 2025, catastrophic flooding began moving through the Texas Hill Country. By the time the waters receded, 139 people were dead. I have been carrying that number — and everything behind it — for eleven months.

Five distinct floods, unleashed by catastrophic rainfall that stalled over the region for days, inundated 12 counties across more than 100 miles of Texas Hill Country terrain [42, 46]. The National Weather Service classified it as a single catastrophic regional event. Two of the five floods were classified by the National Weather Service as 1-in-1,000 year events, the Guadalupe River flood in Kerr County and the flooding across Burnet, Travis, and Williamson Counties [42]. The remaining three floods struck the San Saba, Llano, and Colorado River systems to the north and east, the Concho River watershed near San Angelo, and the Frio and Nueces Rivers in Uvalde County several days later. In Hunt, the Guadalupe River was flowing at approximately 53 gallons per second at midnight on the morning of the 4th. By 3:30am, it reached 125,000 gallons per second [22]. The river continued to climb. By 5:10am, it rose more than 21 additional feet, cresting at 37.52 feet, the highest level ever recorded on the Guadalupe [82]. Thirteen camps in Kerr and Kendall Counties sustained damage [9] in the same waters that took the lives of 119 people in Kerr County alone [33]. In total, 139 people died [42], ranging in age from 1 to 91 [33].

The impact of the floods is vast. The public narrative has centered on one part of that picture. The full picture — of loss, of survival, of grief, and of a community still in the midst of recovery — has gone largely untold.

My perspective on the floods comes from two vantage points — as a licensed psychotherapist who works with grief and trauma, and as a native Texan with cherished memories in the Hill Country. My husband and I got engaged sitting in a canoe on the Guadalupe River. I attended Camp Mystic as a young girl, and my daughter was a counselor at Camp Mystic Cypress Lake during the flood on July 4th. I am writing, not as a neutral observer, but as a personally affected clinician who believes that transparency about my perspective is more honest and more useful than pretending that I am an outsider looking in.

What Has Gone Largely Untold

Family and friends are grieving their loved ones. Survivors lived through harrowing experiences. First responders, community and civic leaders, and media that covered the floods in person experienced the aftermath firsthand. The rivers and waterways of Texas hold a special place in the hearts of those who live, work, and gather along their banks. People across Texas, the US, and the globe watched the story unfold and feel the grief and trauma of the community. Everyone touched by the floods carries their own unique perspective and response.

Each person impacted is moving through life the best way they know how to do. Family members are trying to piece their lives back together after loss, survivors are focused on healing, and the community is rebuilding. When a regional disaster of this magnitude affects so many people, we also have a collective response to the event. As the media reported on the floods, a public narrative took shape. One narrative of the July 4th floods became the dominant one, and the other stories faded out of view.

On July 4th, 2025, Governor Abbott declared a state of disaster for the affected counties, designating initial resources and triggering federal assistance [1]. The declaration was subsequently amended on July 22nd to include 30 counties across the affected region [2]. The state of Texas then formed a Joint Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding and called a special session of the legislature [69, 75]. The committee heard testimony from experts and community members [75], legislation was passed to fund a flood warning siren system [41, 45], and legislation intended to strengthen broader disaster preparedness was introduced but did not pass [79]. A second special session resulted in new laws related to camp safety after campers and counselors died at a summer camp in the floods [70, 71]. In October, a Joint General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events was announced [45, 68, 76]. The communities impacted by the floods hoped for inquiry, funding, support and solutions that address the full scope of the disaster. The scope of the legislative process was narrowed alongside the public narrative.

The whole picture has been lost in that narrowing. The rest of the story has not yet entered the conversation. Three analogies can help us expand our view.

The Blindfolded People and the Elephant

There’s an analogy that many people have heard before. It goes something like this:

A group of blindfolded people are brought into a room to encounter something they’ve never experienced before. Each reaches out and touches a different part. One feels a leg and says it’s like a tree. Another feels the trunk and says it’s like a snake. Another feels the side and says it’s like a wall. They argue, each certain they are right — none realizing they are all touching the same thing — an elephant. None of them are wrong. And none of them are seeing the whole picture.

The Texas Hill Country floods brought together many different groups of people, each holding one true part of a much larger story. This has led to three different perspectives and three related conversations. One group is focused on camp safety. They are grieving the loss of children who died in the floods, and they are advocating for laws and policies to ensure that camps have procedures in place to keep children safe. The second group is made up of survivors, families, and community members, concentrated in Kerr County where 119 of the 139 deaths occurred, who lost loved ones, homes, and businesses, and who still don’t feel safe when storms come. They are asking the media and policymakers to recognize the full scope of the disaster, to address the infrastructure failures that contributed to the loss of life, and to improve how Texas responds to and recovers from natural disasters. The third group is survivors carrying trauma from the floods themselves, trauma that continues to be compounded by a public narrative that has largely excluded their experience and a legislative process that has not addressed their needs. They are asking for resources and support for individual and community healing, and for recognition that the mental health fallout from these floods is a direct consequence of incomplete disaster response.

The challenge in this analogy is that the groups of blindfolded people don’t realize they are only touching one part of the elephant, or seeing the situation from one vantage point. It’s difficult to have a public discussion about the floods when we haven’t defined the topic. The conversation about camp safety became the dominant focus of the public narrative, the media coverage, and the legislative process. In effect, three separate and equally important conversations were collapsed into one. When that happens, people talk past each other, certain voices get crowded out entirely, and solutions designed for one conversation don’t work for the others. This narrowing of focus is a completely predictable and deeply human response to catastrophic loss. To understand why, it helps to understand something about how grief works.

Grief is the intense physical and psychological response that follows significant loss — loss of life, of homes and livelihoods, of safety, of a sense of community. Grieving is the ongoing process of adapting to that loss over time [48]. Most of us learned about grief through the work of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — gave the world its first accessible framework for understanding the experience of loss [32]. What neuroscience now tells us, through Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor's longitudinal brain imaging research [47], is that grief is not a linear sequence of stages with a defined endpoint. It moves more like the stock market — up and down, up and down — coming in bursts of intensity that, with time and support, gradually reduce in frequency [48]. For most people, grieving moves naturally toward adaptation and meaning reconstruction. For some, the process becomes complicated — layered with trauma, unresolved questions, and the added weight of feeling invisible in their own grief.

Grief researchers, including Dr. Robert Neimeyer and David Kessler, have documented that channeling grief into advocacy and action — creating foundations, working toward legislative change, seeking accountability — is one of the most fundamental and healthy human responses to devastating loss [29, 44]. When families who have lost a child make meaning through advocacy, they are doing something deeply human and clinically understandable. It is a way to make sense out of a loss that makes no sense at all, and to find meaning — not in the fact that a person we love is gone — but in how we live our lives to remember and honor the ones we lost.

Everyone affected and everyone who hears about a natural disaster feels the impact of the loss and the trauma. Each individual grieves the losses that touched them and moves through the grieving process in their own way. Secondary trauma, the trauma that comes from witnessing or hearing about another person’s devastating loss, helps explain why the camp safety narrative spread beyond the families themselves and into the broader public consciousness. As legislators responded to the floods, they faced what any human being faces in the presence of devastating loss, the pull toward urgency, toward action, toward answers. What followed was both understandable and worth examining carefully. As Texas Policy Research noted in their April 2026 analysis of the legislative hearings: “When children lose their lives, the urgency becomes overwhelming. Lawmakers feel that urgency. The public feels it. And in many ways, it is appropriate that they do, but it is precisely in these moments, when emotions run highest, that the role of government must be approached with the greatest care” [78]. It’s important for legislators to investigate fully, follow due process, and apply consistent standards when it comes to adapting or initiating new laws and policies.

Camp safety is one of three important and interconnected conversations that emerged from the floods. Two other topics have been largely invisible in the public narrative and legislative process. The next two analogies make those visible.

The Magnifying Glass

Imagine that you’re standing in an art gallery in front of a large painting. You have a magnifying glass and you’re standing very close staring at one corner of the artwork. From this perspective, there is no way that you will be able to see or understand the entire painting.

The Joint Committee held the magnifying glass, and pointed it at one corner. The broader flood context was outside the defined scope. The second group of people standing in the room with the elephant, those asking for a wider investigation, are asking for something simple: zoom out.

When the magnifying glass stays on one corner, the rest of the picture — an entire regional natural disaster and everyone it touched — disappears from the official record. There is so much more to this story. Parents who lost a child — in some cases multiple children. People who lost one or more family members — in some cases an entire family. People who were swept out of their own homes, RVs, cars, and tents. Families and friends who were separated and wandering barefoot and soaked to the bone looking for the people that they love. People who rescued others. People who survived by floating on a mattress, floating in a cabin that dislodged from its foundation, moving to higher ground, sheltering in place, going upstairs, or climbing onto the roof. People who survived by hanging onto a tree limb in a raging river in a thunderstorm for hours in the middle of the night. People who lost their home, their business, their car, or everything they own. The campers and counselors who lost a friend they were just sleeping next to or had just talked to a few hours before bedtime. The people who woke up on the morning of the 4th and had no idea that their entire world had changed forever while they slept. The first responders. Law enforcement officers. The search and rescue crews. The disaster response teams. Local, state, and national leaders. Media personnel. Community outreach and support organizations. Every person who has heard or seen the news and been touched by this tragedy. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is intentionally long. Let that sink in for a minute.

A disaster of this magnitude requires a response as wide as the disaster itself. In the same way that there are models to help us understand how to move through grief and trauma, there are also models to help us move through disasters. Zunin and Myers outline a 6 phase model for disaster recovery that includes: pre-disaster, impact, heroic, honeymoon, disillusionment, and reconstruction [88]. As is the case with individuals, an entire community can get stuck in a phase on the road to recovery.

The 5th phase of the disaster recovery model is disillusionment, which is “characterized by optimism turning to discouragement” [88]. This is when an “increasing gap between needs and assistance leads to feelings of abandonment” [88]. The Kerr County community — where there were 119 deaths, where the topography is unrecognizable, and where people now designate landmarks based on the number of blank slabs and the height of the water line on buildings that are still standing yet destroyed — is suffering. They are stuck in the disillusionment phase. This phase is often described as the “second disaster” when crisis resources are no longer offered, and the rest of the world moves on despite the ongoing impact on every aspect of life for the survivors [88].

Part of what keeps a community stuck in disillusionment is the absence of a full accounting. Even though the investigators assigned by the legislative committee complied with their directive to narrow the scope of the investigation, the lead investigator, Casey Garrett, still shared in her concluding remarks at the legislative hearing on April 27, 2026: “It wasn’t just Mystic. Guys it was not just Mystic. You have a big job to do because it was — it was all those camps where kids were just lucky. They either were lucky that they weren’t in session. They were lucky that their session hadn’t started. They were lucky that the cabin they were in, floating down the river, they just didn’t die. Taking nothing away from God’s miracles, they were God’s miracles, but it wasn’t camp safety” [19]. Keeping the magnifying glass on one corner literally magnifies one part and leaves the rest of the picture unexamined.

When a magnifying glass is held that close, everything outside its edges disappears, including the context that would change what you're seeing. What started as a Joint General Legislative Committee tasked with making a "complete and thorough examination of the facts and circumstances surrounding the flooding events which occurred on or about July 4, 2025, and which resulted in the tragic loss of life and injuries to Texans" [74] turned into a "Report on the Camp Mystic Flood Disaster of July 4, 2025" [77]. The investigative report released in June 2026 referenced “at least 135” [77] deaths. The actual number, confirmed through NWS records and public documentation, is 139 [42]. The report acknowledges deficiencies by DSHS, local officials, TDEM, coordination and leadership with responders who arrived on-site, and coordination and leadership at the reunification center later in the day [77]. Those acknowledgements are quickly set aside to focus on the actions of people responding to catastrophic flooding in the middle of the night.

The magnifying glass also rendered an entire regional disaster invisible. The flood on the Guadalupe River was a 1,000-year flood. The broader storm caused multiple rivers across multiple counties to flood simultaneously, making this a regional disaster of historic proportions. Natural disasters of this scale require specific expertise: meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency management specialists, and disaster response and recovery experts. The National Disaster Recovery Framework, a federal guide specifically designed to evaluate emergency response to events of this magnitude, provides a structured approach to after-action review [18]. There is no public record of a formal, unified after-action report for these floods. The records obtained after a month of requests revealed that on July 3rd, only one six-person team was stationed in Kerrville with no boats, no helicopters, and roads that were already flooding as the only access route [6]. A full accounting of what happened, the kind the National Disaster Recovery Framework was designed to support, was never requested by the committee.

The broader history of Texas flooding was not reviewed. The most relevant parallel is the Memorial Day flood of 2015 on the Blanco River in Wimberley — an overnight flash flood caused by intense rainfall that rapidly transformed the river into a powerful, fast-moving force before many could react. Thirteen people died, two children’s bodies were never recovered, and hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed [38]. The sequence of events is eerily similar. As early as 2016, Kerr County commissioners identified the need for a flood warning system along the Guadalupe River. Over the next decade, the county applied for federal grants, discussed funding options, and revisited the proposal nearly two dozen times. The system was never funded. It was never built [34]. The legislative investigation did not ask why, and it did not pursue what had been proposed, stalled, or left unaddressed in the years between.

In the first special session called in response to the July 4th disaster, legislation specifically intended to strengthen disaster preparedness and response at the state level was introduced and never made it out of committee [79]. Survivors were invited to give testimony at a hearing on July 31st [75] when the community was in the earliest phases of disaster response, moving through shock and the adrenaline of rescue and recovery [88]. The vast majority of survivors and family members of those who died were not invited to share their stories, their needs, or their concerns at the legislative hearings in April 2026 [73]. When legislators visited Camp Mystic in April 2026, Kerr County community members stood on the side of the road with signs reading "119 — They All Matter — Every Life Counts — Answers for All" [57] — a community standing in the wreckage of their own lives, still having to ask to be heard. The people of the Hill Country deserve answers, and they deserve to feel safe again in their homes, their businesses, and their community.

Filtered Lenses

We have all probably heard the saying about someone wearing rose colored glasses to reflect that they have a positive outlook on life. We might say that someone with a more pessimistic outlook is wearing grey colored glasses. To understand this analogy, let’s talk first about the lenses that you wear in your everyday life. Think of them as your customized prescription for eyeglasses or contacts. These represent your unique perspective on yourself, other people and the world around you. These everyday lenses are shaped and colored from birth and throughout your life by several factors: your earliest attachments to your primary caregivers, positive and negative experiences throughout your childhood and into your adult life, your family environment, and the broader social and cultural context of the time and place where you grew up. All of these together shape the essence of who you are as a human being. As Dr. Kate Truitt, licensed clinical psychologist and applied neuroscientist specializing in traumatic grief and resilience, explains: “This is how our core values — seeded at an early age, often before we are even aware of them — guide how we behave, make decisions, build relationships, think about the world, and much more” [80]. I see the world through a lens that is as unique as my fingerprint, prescribed only for me based on my personal history and experiences. The same is true for you.

As you move through life your perspective will shift slightly, in the same way that your eyesight might change slowly over time. And then you can have experiences where your perspective changes drastically in an instant. This can happen with positive experiences, such as a new relationship, a move to a new place, or a career milestone. It also happens with challenging experiences, especially in the case of a traumatic event or a significant loss. When this happens, it’s like you suddenly need a brand new prescription. You can think of this change as happening so fast that you need clip-on sunglasses with filtered lenses to wear over your original glasses. The prescription needed is specific to the challenge that you experience. If someone lives with chronic pain, you could say that they are wearing “pain glasses”. If someone loses a loved one, it’s common in the therapist community to say that person is seeing the world through “grief glasses”.

Flash floods that kill 139 people are traumatic for virtually everyone in their path. Many grief and trauma experts state that there is grief in all trauma, so every single person impacted by the floods, no matter how directly or indirectly, is wearing their own version of “traumatic grief glasses”. Each one of us has our own prescription — our personal lens through which we see the world differently than we did on July 3rd.

Neuroscience explains how the brain, body, and the nervous system process and encode information from a traumatic event. As an instinctive fight-or-flight response, the brain asks three questions: Am I safe or in danger? Am I connected or alone? Are my needs met or not? [80]. As Dr. Kate Truitt describes in her NeuroTriad Model, the brain asks these questions and encodes the answers as a part of our most primitive survival instinct [80]. Part of the brain essentially tells us “Here, wear these trauma glasses because they will keep you safe”, and the rest of your brain, nervous system, and body fall in line. So, every person impacted by the floods has their own unique encoding, their own filtered lens through which they now see the world. Grief and trauma experts call this sudden and total shift in perspective “the shattering of the assumptive world” [26]. Everything one knows to be true about themselves, other people, and the world around them is suddenly, and without consent, called into question.

The initial trauma and losses from the floods themselves, combined with the ongoing cumulative trauma following the floods, are having an impact on the mental health of individuals and on our community. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call this the “third disaster”, a term rooted in disaster research to describe the mental health fallout that follows when logistical recovery falls short. People with filtered lenses are the third group standing in the room with the elephant. The individual and collective impact is exacerbated by the legislative process, by the media, and by the court of public opinion focusing on one aspect of the floods. The fallout from the floods, compounded by incomplete disaster response and a narrowed public narrative, has reached the scale of a public health crisis. It must be named as one.

Grief and trauma responses run deeper than most of us expect, and the terms I am about to describe may be new to you. You will likely recognize them in your own experience, or in the experience of someone you love. Mental health professionals look for common themes in how people cope after a loss or traumatic event, then they name the dynamics, describe them, and provide suggestions for coping with those dynamics. Simply knowing that you are not alone in the way that you feel and think can bring relief, and sometimes that is exactly where healing begins.

In the aftermath of a disaster, grief and trauma take many forms, and not all of them are equally visible or acknowledged. Disenfranchised grief, a term coined by bereavement scholar Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, is “grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly supported” [15]. It is visible in the survivors whose stories have gone untold and in the people who are quietly grieving alone. Others are experiencing survivor's grief, distinct from survivor's guilt, simply because they are alive and someone they care about died in the floods [22, 50]. Secondary losses are the quieter griefs that ripple outward from a disaster. They reach everyone, whether they were in the direct path of the floods or not, including the loss of a sense of safety, the loss of social connections, the loss of financial security, and the loss of traditions and shared experiences that have anchored this community for generations.

When people are affected by loss in different ways, hierarchies can emerge as a form of or a result of disenfranchised grief. In individual loss, Robson and Walter argue that “social norms about the legitimacy of bereavement are... hierarchical” [53] based on the bereaved’s relationship to the person who died. When a spouse dies, the surviving partner is surrounded with support and allowed to grieve while an adult sibling may be holding it together in public and therefore assumed to be okay. In collective loss after disasters, Brady and colleagues describe hierarchies of affectedness that “have practical influences on the way that the media, governments, emergency management organisations, support agencies and the broader population interact with disaster-affected people, and can influence the way those impacted by disasters view each other” [11]. When one group’s loss is placed at the center of the public narrative and all other losses are relegated to the margins, it sends a message, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, about whose grief is acknowledged and whose is not. The 139 who died, including the 119 in Kerr County alone, have been largely absent from the public narrative and the legislative record. Entire families perished in the floods, and their story has received almost no public attention in the legislative or media narrative. Survivors who lost loved ones, homes, and businesses in the broader floods have been left out of the legislative process entirely. First responders and community volunteers have been publicly honored, and they too carry wounds that deserve support in addition to praise. The young campers and counselors who survived and came home changed have been overlooked in the narrative. This is disenfranchised grief at a community scale, and the mental health fallout is a real and direct consequence of that disenfranchisement.

Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Dr. Pauline Boss to describe the phenomenon when a person is both present and absent at the same time [10]. The brain struggles with ambiguity in ordinary circumstances. In grief, ambiguity can feel unbearable. It is the experience of not knowing whether to grieve or to hope, of being suspended between loss and possibility with no clear place to land. The families who have not yet been able to lay their loved one to rest are living in the profoundly painful in-between. Ambiguous loss also shows up in ways that are felt deeply yet hard to pinpoint. For campers and counselors, it’s in grieving and remembering while also holding love for an experience and a community that has been fundamentally and permanently changed. And for survivors and community members across the broader flood region, ambiguous loss lives in a different question: not knowing whether the response they need will come, or whether they will be safe when the next storm arrives. Dr. Boss describes it as “frozen grief” [10] because you cannot fully mourn what you are not yet certain you have lost.

When the brain is trying to process a tragedy of this magnitude, it replays what happened over and over, searching for a different ending. It would rather run scenarios on a loop than sit with the pain of what actually happened. Survivor's guilt is the feeling of responsibility for surviving when others did not. It is a recognized and well-documented trauma response. Robert Jay Lifton described this as "death guilt" [36, 58], the painful experience of surviving when others did not, compounded by what he called "failed enactment": the belief that a person did not, or could not, act as they would have expected of themselves in the disaster [36, 58]. Closely related and equally important is moral injury, the psychological wound that comes from making impossible choices under impossible conditions. Litz and colleagues define moral injury as the damage that results from “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs” [37]. In disaster contexts, moral injury most often takes an omission-based form. As Molendijk describes it, omission-based moral injury arises from “failure to prevent suffering or provide assistance to those in need” [40]. Survivors and responders who could not reach people in time are carrying the weight of omission-based moral injury.

Research on how the brain responds to trauma and loss helps explain why that weight feels so real and so convincing. Hindsight bias, the tendency to believe an event was predictable after it already happened [54], and outcome bias, judging the quality of a decision based on its outcome rather than on what was known and reasonable at the time [7], are both operating powerfully in this situation. Dr. Kate Truitt describes the brain’s “endless hypotheticals” [80] as its way of trying to keep us safe, writing that “they are an inherent part of our narrative as humans. We will always seek to understand and make meaning” [80]. The “if only” and “I should have” narratives that survivors, responders, and community members are carrying are evidence of human beings navigating trauma glasses, death guilt, and moral injury simultaneously. What may feel like a personal failure is actually the brain trying to make sense of a tragedy that defies understanding.

The cumulative impact of empathic engagement with others’ trauma, what researchers Laurie Anne Pearlman and Karen W. Saakvitne first identified as vicarious trauma, transforms caregivers’ beliefs, emotions, worldview, and sense of safety [49]. First responders, search and rescue teams, law enforcement, disaster response personnel, and mental health providers who have been living inside the collective trauma from the floods for eleven months are not immune to that transformation. They need support too.

Every concept outlined above is a filtered lens. Each one shapes what a person can and cannot see in the aftermath of the floods. And like all trauma glasses, they do their work whether we are aware of them or not, whether we intend for them to or not. When someone is wearing trauma glasses, their thoughts — interpretations, conclusions, and meaning-making — can feel indistinguishable from facts. The brain, in its effort to keep the person safe, presents its filtered version of reality as the only reality.

The Convergence

When individual filtered lenses combine at a community level, a collective narrative begins to emerge. The three analogies are not separate ideas. They are three different ways that perspective gets shaped by loss, trauma, and disaster all happening at once. The elephant explains how people have different perspectives. The magnifying glass illustrates how focusing on one part of the picture prevents us from seeing the whole. The filtered lenses help us understand why the picture remains blurry. When all three operate simultaneously in the aftermath of a disaster, they converge. The result is one dominant public narrative that crowds out other losses, the stories of other survivors, and the other conversations that are vital to the recovery of the entire community.

The floods are a mark on our individual and collective history. For the thousands of people impacted in Texas and beyond, July 4th, 2025 will forever be etched in our minds. It will hold a place next to events, like 9/11, that changed our lives and the world as we see it.

The aftermath is another mark in our history. This second mark is the subject of this article. This mark is the story that we collectively tell about the floods. The story matters. The words that we use and how we tell the story matters. When perspectives differ, when the focus narrows to one part of the picture, and when filtered lenses shape what we can see, the story gets convoluted.

Our perspectives shape the story that we tell, individually and collectively. The facts of the floods are just that, facts. They are observable, verifiable, and independent of interpretation or emotional response — like an eye chart on the wall. It just is what it is. Our thoughts and feelings about the floods, by contrast, are filtered through our own customized prescription and whatever filtered lenses our brain has put in place to keep us safe. Recognizing the distinction between facts and a person’s filtered perspective is essential — and simultaneously very difficult when the brain is in survival mode. When filtered lenses are operating at a collective scale, thoughts get presented as facts, interpretations get presented as evidence, and conclusions get built on filtered perceptions rather than complete information. The words that are used and the story that is told in the media, in the court of public opinion, and in policy discussions are expressions of opinion. They are not necessarily facts. Making the distinction between facts and filtered perceptions determines how accurately we can identify what the problems are, who if anyone is at fault, who needs support, and what solutions might actually help. As we look at the three conversations with fresh eyes, that distinction is the standard we will try to hold.

If you are reading this article as someone who is directly or indirectly impacted by the floods, my hope for you is that your experience is reflected in the descriptions of grief, trauma, and natural disaster recovery, and that you have support to heal in your own time and in your own way.

The community — the people directly impacted by the floods, who are simultaneously navigating their own grief and trauma while supporting their neighbors — has responded with extraordinary resilience and generosity. This community response deserves recognition and continued support. The public narrative is something different. It is built from media coverage, legislative framing, and voices in the broader court of public opinion — perspectives that come with their own agendas and filters, often from people watching from a distance rather than living inside the experience itself. It is the public narrative — not the community response — that this article is asking you to question. Before you share, before you post, before you weigh in on what someone should have known or done differently, I would ask you to pause. Read the stories of the people who were there. Listen to the survivors. Ask yourself what it would have felt like to look out your window at 2am, check the weather, think everything will be okay, and then moments later find yourself surrounded by rising water with nowhere to go. That is the experience of real people, people with names and families and histories, whose stories deserve the same compassion you would want for your own.

If you are reading this article as a member of the media, my hope is that you will cover the full scope of this regional disaster. Name all 139 who died. Make room for every category of survivor and every category of loss. Let them tell their stories. The words chosen in coverage of disasters like this one shape how the narrative gets framed, how communities heal, and who gets support. That is a profound responsibility.

What follows is an opening to the three conversations that the analogies point toward: camp safety, natural disaster response and recovery, and the mental health impact on survivors and the affected community. I am asking legislators and policy makers to consider all 3 conversations, and what can be done at a state and institutional level to support survivors. For each of the three conversations we will look at what the research tells us, what steps have already been taken, where the challenges remain, and what we can do to move forward. The specific policy concerns differ by conversation. The foundation underneath all of them is the same — no one who was touched by these floods should be invisible in the story we tell about them.

Camp Safety

The first and most prominent conversation we have been having is about camp safety. The grief and trauma of the floods are the reason we all ended up wandering around wearing blindfolds, trying to make sense of what in the world just happened. When 25 campers, 2 counselors, and 1 adult died at one summer camp, it makes complete sense that camp safety became a primary focus for change moving forward. The intensity of the grief the entire community feels about these losses is palpable still today, and it will forever be on our hearts and minds. So, let’s continue the conversation about how to ensure that camps are safe for all children.

Robert Neimeyer’s research on meaning reconstruction after loss speaks to what happens when individuals and communities try to make sense of devastating and senseless events. The meaning we make — the stories we tell about why things happened and who is responsible — is a fundamental part of the grief process [44]. It is also one of the places where we are most vulnerable to confusing our interpretations with facts. When meaning-making moves from the personal to the collective — when it shapes legislation, media narratives, and public policy — the distinction between interpreted meaning and verified fact becomes not just a clinical concern but a civic one.

The camp safety work that has been done represents a real and necessary beginning. A special session of the Texas legislature was called. Senate Bill 1 — Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act, and House Bill 1 — Youth CAMPER Act, were signed into law on September 5, 2025 [70, 71]. A joint legislative committee was formed to investigate the flood on the Guadalupe River. The testimony and outcomes from the legislative hearings in April 2026, documented in the report released June 18, 2026, are focused on camp safety [77]. Steps are being taken to implement the directives of SB1, HB1, and the conclusions from the hearings held by the joint legislative committee [70, 71].

Because the investigation was framed as a criminal inquiry rather than a disaster review, the camp safety conversation has been built on an incomplete evidentiary foundation [19]. Questions of individual negligence have been examined. Questions of systemic infrastructure failure have not. As a result, the full context of what happened on the night of July 3rd into July 4th, the meteorological conditions, the infrastructure failures, the communication gaps, has not been part of the official camp safety record [77]. This matters for the camp safety conversation itself. Without it, the laws that have been passed may address some of what went wrong, and miss other things entirely.

What was left out of the investigation is specific and documentable. The staff members who were responsible for children at camps along the Guadalupe River that night were managing a catastrophic flood in complete darkness, without outside emergency support for hours, and without the information needed to act differently [77]. The investigation examined what decisions were made. It did not examine what information and resources were available when those decisions were made. Those are two different questions, and only one of them has been asked.

The consequences of legislation passed quickly and narrowly are already visible. Camps across Texas are scrambling to comply with laws that were written for one circumstance and now apply to every camp in the state, regardless of location, size, or the nature of the risk. Camp Oak Haven, which served approximately 100 children from low-income and rural communities, will not reopen this summer. Orr Family Ministries sold the land because it could not meet the new state regulations [59]. Board president Cynthia Royal said: “Lawmakers threw out a blanket rule for all camps across the entire state without taking realistic things into consideration” [59]. Camp Oak Haven is not alone. Implementation questions have been slow to be answered and support has been inconsistent. Camps have been navigating an implementation process without clear guidance or consistent support, and families across Texas have been making summer plans in the shadow of that uncertainty.

Hundreds of campers and counselors were physically present at camps across the affected region on the night of July 3rd — children and young adults who survived something terrifying, who came home changed, and who are now watching strangers debate whether they are allowed to grieve. Beyond them, thousands more are affected — campers and counselors whose summer looks nothing like what they had hoped, families who rely on camp not only as a meaningful experience for their children but as a childcare solution while parents work, and children with special needs who depend on specialized programming that only certain camps provide. These children and young adults are experiencing their own losses: the loss of a familiar routine, a summer community, and the anticipated adventures of a season that may not come. In the years following the covid pandemic, research is documenting the lasting impact on children whose schools closed for months: increases in anxiety, depression, social difficulty, and developmental delay [86]. The disruption of a summer camp experience is a loss of the same kind. We know what happens when we minimize the impact of disruption to childhood. We are still measuring the cost.

The camp safety laws that have been passed represent a necessary and meaningful beginning, and they must be treated as a beginning, not a finish line. Representative Wes Virdell, who represents the communities most directly affected by the floods, has publicly identified six specific concerns with the current legislation, including ambiguous regulatory language, prohibitive compliance costs, unrealistic implementation timelines, fee increases, and failure to distinguish between high-risk and lower-risk camp programs [12]. The fiber optic internet requirement, which prevented most Texas camps from obtaining licensure for summer 2026 before a legal settlement created a temporary workaround [60], illustrates precisely why implementation matters as much as intention. These are arguments for camp safety standards that are clear, funded, and actually implementable across every type of camp in the state of Texas.

This article is asking that the laws already passed be made workable for camps of every size and location, and that the camp industry be recognized as essential to the recovery of the Hill Country community. Families across Texas have spent this summer adapting, finding alternatives, and grieving the loss of plans that mattered, not because they gave up on camp, but because they had no choice. For many, the hope is that this summer is the exception and next summer is the return. That hope depends on the decisions made now. And beyond the flood zone, the disruption to the camp industry is being felt across the state. The children and young adults who attend camps in this state deserve safety standards that are real, verified, and built on the complete picture of what happened on July 4th and in the days that followed.

Camp safety is one of three conversations. Two more are waiting, and the community affected by the floods deserves to have all three heard with equal urgency and equal care.

Natural Disaster Response and Recovery

The July 2025 floods were a regional natural disaster of historic proportions — 139 deaths, five floods covering the span of 12 counties, conditions that exceeded anything this region had seen before, and infrastructure failures that affected communities far beyond any single camp or location. This conversation is about how we respond to natural disasters as a community and as a state — what we do in the immediate crisis, what we do in the months that follow, and what we put in place so that the next catastrophic flood finds us better prepared.

The United States has a long and documented history of catastrophic flooding. The Great Galveston Storm of 1900 remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history, and Texas has continued to face catastrophic flooding events in every generation since [35]. The 2015 Wimberley flood and the July 2025 Hill Country floods are not isolated events; they are a pattern. As early as 2016, Kerr County commissioners identified the need for a flood warning system along the Guadalupe River and spent the next decade discussing it. In 2017, the county applied for a $731,413 FEMA grant toward a $976,000 system. It was denied. Between 2016 and 2025, commissioners discussed flood warning projects nearly two dozen times. It was never funded and never built [34]. The NWS StoryMap, the OIG report, and the volumetric analysis conducted by Kerr County Engineer Charlie Hastings represent the beginning of documenting the science of this most recent disaster [42, 81, 23]. A federal framework specifically designed to evaluate emergency response to events of this scale exists, built to identify what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change [18].

Research from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, examining recovery outcomes after Superstorm Sandy, found that “social network connectedness, social cohesion, trust, and community bonds” [8] were as critical to recovery as economic and physical infrastructure. “Friends and neighbors are the first line of defense in a disaster” [8], with roughly a third of Sandy survivors turning to people they knew for support, while only 16 percent contacted the federal government and 7 percent contacted their state government. “A tight-knit community becomes an asset for recovery, rather than another thing that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up when disaster strikes” [8]. Social connectedness, in other words, is a recovery resource.

There are many things that the community and the state have done in response to the floods. Search and rescue came as soon as they could get to the affected area and they continue to search for those who are still missing [55]. Clean up and clearing is ongoing. TDEM, FEMA, local and state officials, and many national community organizations have provided support and resources [65, 17]. The grassroots work by local community organizations speaks for itself. Community organizations continue to raise and distribute funds to rebuild homes and businesses through Rebuild Kerr, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country's flood recovery fund [52]. More than 50 local, regional, and national organizations are coordinating long-term recovery through Kerr Together [28]. Organizations are working together to replant and restore the river and the landscape through the Hope for the Guadalupe River Recovery Fund and its four partner organizations [24]. This is exactly the kind of social connectedness and community cohesion that research tells us makes the difference between communities that recover and communities that don't. Businesses and individuals have installed the River Sentry warning systems that will protect every child attending camps along the Guadalupe River basin in the summer of 2026 [4, 25]. Let's shine a spotlight on all of it.

Where the response fell short begins with the scope of the investigation itself. The investigation examined one flood out of five, one section of one river, three hours out of days of rain and flooding, and 20% of the deaths that occurred [77]. The families of the other 80% who died, and all who survived, are still waiting for answers. The team hired to lead the investigation brought criminal inquiry expertise rather than disaster response expertise [19]. Criminal investigation and disaster response evaluation are categorically different frameworks requiring categorically different expertise. The investigative team followed the scope they were given and still registered concern that it did not account for the full scale of the disaster [19]. The legislative committee, composed of elected officials accountable to all of their constituents, had the authority to act on that concern. Both days of the legislative hearings were by invitation only [73]. Public comments were accepted but did not meaningfully shape the outcomes [72]. The witnesses invited to speak represented one conversation. Survivors of the broader floods were not among them.

Nearly a year later, the legislation intended to strengthen disaster preparedness never passed, and the question the community is living with is a simple one. On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, a member of the #KerrCounty119 grassroots group posted: “10:41 p.m. The fiber internet is out and my cell service is so bad, I can’t get weather apps to open. It’s pouring rain, thundering, lightning, heavy wind… How are we safer today?” [27].

This article is asking that the July 4th floods be formally named and framed as a regional natural disaster in the public and legislative record. An independent review led by experts in meteorology, hydrology, and emergency management would add to the scientific record in ways that benefit the entire state. The NWS StoryMap, existing volumetric analysis, and the documented history of flooding in this region are available and waiting to be entered into the public and legislative record [42, 23, 34, 38]. Warning systems have been proposed and requested for nearly a decade and have never been funded. The state has recently designated funds for a new system, and the community will be watching to see that commitment fulfilled [41, 84]. Gaps remain in the resources and support needed for the community to move through the disillusionment phase of disaster recovery. This is the “second disaster”, the point where the gap between needs and assistance widens, optimism turns to discouragement, and the rest of the world moves on while survivors are still living inside it [88].

The focus of these requests is based on the documented gap in disaster response in Kerr County. There are four other floods and four other communities, stretching from the Edwards Plateau and Concho Valley through the heart of the Hill Country and northeast to the suburbs of Austin, also recovering from this regional disaster [42]. These communities have access to the same federal and state recovery programs designated through the July 4th disaster declaration [1, 2], though the specific needs and local recovery organizations supporting them are not as well documented in the public record. These communities have also been left out of the conversation with their losses and recovery receiving far less public and legislative attention than they deserve. This article asks the state to name the July 2025 Central Texas flooding as a public health crisis and to provide funding and support for the gaps that remain across all five flood-affected communities.

The disaster recovery conversation and the mental health conversation are not separate — one is the direct and predictable consequence of the other. As we turn to the third conversation, we are moving from what the floods did to the land and the infrastructure to what it has done — and is still doing — to the people who survived them.

The Third Disaster

The people who lived through the floods are still carrying what happened to them, and for many, the weight of it is showing up in ways they may not even recognize yet. The narratives that have left survivors feeling invisible and the failure to respond at the scale of what actually happened have real and serious consequences. It is showing up in people's bodies, in their sleep, in their relationships, and in their ability to function [61]. The mental health fallout of the floods and their aftermath is taking a toll. In part, the bereavement hierarchy that has been created, however unintentionally, has produced disenfranchised grief at a community scale. Survivors who do not fit the primary narrative have found themselves navigating not only their own grief but the social consequences of expressing it. Collectively, we are in the midst of the “second disaster”, and in the midst of a “third disaster” when it comes to the mental health impact on survivors. This is the third conversation.

Dr. Robert Neimeyer describes the collective process the Hill Country community is navigating: “We confront a landscape of loss in our lives when we experience profound bereavement... all of our old maps no longer work, everything’s rearranged... the trail along which we were hiking meets with a dead end and it’s impassable and so we have to trailblaze and find a different direction and there’s no Google Maps that will help us do it” [43]. David Kessler adds another dimension: “grief is about our heart, but our mind can take over and get in the way... There are the facts that happen, and then your mind will often make up a story about that” [30]. Both observations point to the same clinical reality — meaning-making is a fundamental part of the grieving process. When grief and trauma get this complicated, our brains start trying to make sense of things in ways that aren’t always accurate. At a community scale, that process stops being personal and starts shaping everything around it: the public narrative, the legislative response, and who gets to be seen as a survivor.

In the aftermath of catastrophic loss, finger pointing, blame, and anger are very natural human responses. People's brains are trying to make sense of the nonsensical. Experts tell us that feeling like there was something we could have done, even if we didn't do it, feels better than accepting that some things simply don't make sense and they never will. Dr. Neimeyer describes the process this way: "Grief takes the form of an urgent dialogue with ourselves, with one part wanting to stand firm, digging our heels and refusing the change that life is pressing upon us, while another part recognizes the necessity of that” [43]. Attachment researchers and grief neuroscientists explain that the brain cycles between these two states called protest and despair [48]. Protest is the brain searching relentlessly for answers, for accountability, for something that could have been done differently. Despair is the body collapsing from the weight of what was lost. Most people cycle back and forth, sometimes within the same day. When an entire community is cycling between protest and despair simultaneously without a shared framework for understanding what's happening, it becomes nearly impossible to have a coherent conversation or to see the whole picture from inside the pain.

The risk of heart attack is 21 times higher on the day of a loved one’s death, and nearly double in the three months following a spouse’s death. These health risks have been recognized in actuarial tables by insurance companies for decades — making the case that grief is a public health issue, not only a mental health one [48].

Historically, it has taken communities and institutions a long time to understand the scope of trauma exposure after large scale events. What we now call posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was once dismissed as shell shock in soldiers returning from war. It was considered a moral failing rather than a neurological response to trauma. PTSD was not formally recognized in the United States until 1980 [83]. Even then, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who has spent decades working with veterans and trauma survivors, was denied a grant for trauma research shortly after. The reason cited was that "it has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration" [83]. The journey from shell shock to the current clinical understanding of PTSD is a direct parallel to what disaster survivor communities experience when their trauma is not named, not witnessed, and not supported.

Kai T. Erikson, a sociologist, was one of the first to name and document what happens to communities in the aftermath of catastrophic floods. In his study of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia, he cites researcher F.C. Wallace in describing what he called “the disaster syndrome” — “the numbness and apathy and insomnia and depression — are in part a reaction to the thought that the community, and maybe even the whole world, has been obliterated altogether and can no longer serve as a source of personal support” [16]. Those who witnessed the aftermath of the Hill Country floods have described the landscape as resembling a war zone — a response that is clinically consistent with Erikson’s documentation of how catastrophic loss changes both the physical landscape and a community’s perception of its social environment. Erikson is careful to note that this level of collective despair is not inevitable following a disaster — it emerges when complicating factors converge. In the Hill Country, that convergence is exactly what we are seeing.

Formal disaster support was mobilized for the affected areas following the July floods. FEMA announced assistance for Kerr County, SAMHSA specifically activated the Disaster Distress Helpline for those affected by the Texas flash flooding, and Texas disaster behavioral health resources and local crisis lines were made available [17, 62, 66, 67]. Within hours of the flood, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country launched the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund. From that foundation, Rebuild Kerr was created to direct funding toward housing, mental health, community restoration, and long-term resiliency, and Kerr Together was built to bring more than 50 local, regional, and national organizations together to coordinate the delivery of those services [52, 28]. Rebuild Kerr has directed mental health funding specifically toward navigation services, school-based counseling, and specialized support for grief and mental health professionals [52]. Hill Country Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Centers has expanded its emotional support drop-in center to serve community members navigating the ongoing impacts of the floods [64].

Crisis support addresses the immediate aftermath. The mental health needs of disaster survivors don’t peak in the first weeks; they deepen over time. As the one-year mark approaches, as summer returns, and as the community navigates what it means to gather at the river again, the need for structured, sustained mental health support is intensifying. A rapid behavioral health needs assessment conducted in Kerr County in September 2025 projected an additional 6,000 adult PTSD cases and 2,100 additional cases of serious emotional disturbance among children and youth in Kerr County alone, with needs expected to remain elevated for a minimum of three years [39]. Communities across the country have documented the same pattern.

Clinical colleagues have shared with me what they witnessed firsthand working in their own communities affected by other disasters. Jennifer Walker, LPC, a licensed psychotherapist who both survived Hurricane Helene and worked on the frontlines of mental health recovery in her community of Swannanoa, North Carolina, described the narrowing of the public narrative and the mental health crisis that deepened as media attention faded. She was also clear that the arc of recovery from a disaster of this scale takes years, far longer than communities anticipate. Dr. Kate Truitt has observed the same dynamics unfolding in real time in her community following the Los Angeles fires in January 2025, a community still very much in the midst of its own recovery. Across these communities, the pattern is consistent: losses go unseen, mental health needs deepen after the cameras leave, and there is a distinct difference between communities that receive comprehensive support and those that don’t.

Neighborhoods with healthier residents, both physically and mentally, are more resilient after a disaster, according to research from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Friends and neighbors, not government agencies, were the first line of defense: roughly a third of Superstorm Sandy survivors turned to people they knew, while only 16 percent contacted FEMA and 7 percent contacted their state government [8]. This illustrates that the grassroots infrastructure is often at the core of the recovery infrastructure, as it is in the Texas Hill Country.

Each person impacted by the floods is moving through grief, trauma, and natural disaster recovery. None of these processes are linear; no human experience ever is. They do, however, have a direction. A light that leads forward. The grief process moves toward acceptance and meaning reconstruction. Healing from trauma moves toward resilience and post-traumatic growth. And the final phase of recovery from a disaster is reconstruction.

Dr. Kate Truitt describes the intentional practice of healing after traumatic grief as making a CASE for resilience, a framework that draws on the way our minds, brains, hearts, and bodies are capable of change and growth even after devastating loss [80]. This is what psychology and neuroscience call resilience and post-traumatic growth. Up to 90 percent of people move through grief or trauma without lasting complications, recovering naturally with support and time [63, 13]. Communities with stronger social ties, trust, and community engagement tend to recover better from disaster [8]. Research from the Truitt Institute supports this orientation toward resilience. In a study of 214 individual therapy sessions, 132 sessions identified a resilient target following trauma desensitization, with data showing that once the system re-enters a stabilized state, it orients toward safety, connection, and agency [87]. We are wired to heal when we have the support that we need.

Here is what policymakers can do to support the community. Name the mental health fallout from this disaster as a public health crisis, one that includes survivors, first responders, community organizers, and everyone who has been carrying the weight of this recovery from the beginning. Then fund the organizations already on the ground, the ones that have been leading recovery efforts, mental health support, and community engagement since the first days after the flood, with flexible, multi-year funding rather than short-term emergency dollars that disappear when the immediate crisis fades, as initial disaster funding inevitably does. Support the development of community resilience hubs, trusted local gathering spaces where survivors can access information, mental health support, and recovery resources for years, not weeks, after a disaster of this scale. And fund local recovery coordinators and community navigators who help survivors access existing systems and healing programs, because the research consistently shows these bridge roles increase trust and access in ways that outside programs never replicate [39]. The communities that recover best are the ones where government resources the people already doing the work.

The Invitation

In his Kerr County Lead article “Monster in the Canyon,” Louis Amestoy wrote: “The storm announced itself in the darkness, through instruments that couldn’t fully measure it, in language that had accompanied dozens of storms that killed no one, through channels that reached professionals but not the people in its path. It was a monster. It deserved to be named as one in that hearing room. It wasn’t” [5].

This storm deserves to be named and framed in a way that signifies the magnitude of it. We name hurricanes. We measure earthquakes. We document tornadoes. Naming and framing events allows our brains to process what happened and understand its significance, and it applies to all grief, all trauma, and all disasters that leave a mark on a community. This one left a mark: 139 lives lost across the region, thousands of survivors, seven rivers that leapt over their banks, more than half of the vegetation along the Guadalupe’s floodway destroyed [64], and hundreds of homes and businesses wiped off their foundation and swept away. The people it affected — all of them — deserve to be seen. And the community it devastated deserves a response as complete and as wide as the disaster itself.

We will remember everyone who was lost in the floods: from the youngest — James Burgess, Clay Parisher, and Carlos Romero, who were one year old — to the oldest, Sally Graves, who was 91 years old [33].

The names, ages, relationships, and locations in this section are sourced from multiple sources [3, 14, 20, 21, 33, 42, 51, 85].

We remember the 45 children and teenagers, including the infants, the toddlers, the campers, and the counselors.

We remember the 12 young adults, including the friends who were vacationing together.

We remember the camp directors.

We remember the adults.

We remember the families who perished together.

We remember the parents who died with their children.

We remember the couples.

We remember the siblings.

We remember the grandchildren and their grandparents.

We remember those who died at HTR TX Hill Country, at Camp Mystic, at Casa Bonita, at Blue Oak RV Park, at River Inn Resort, and in the riverfront homes, cabins, cars, campgrounds, RV parks and vacation rentals along the Guadalupe River corridor between Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville, and in every place the rivers reached that night.

We remember those who died in Kerr County, and those who died in Burnet, Travis, Tom Green, Uvalde, and Williamson counties as well.

We remember everyone whose name we may not yet know — and we hold space for any loss not yet fully accounted for here.

We remember Michael Phillips, Marble Falls Volunteer Fire Chief, who died in the line of duty on July 5th while responding to flood rescues — one of the helpers who ran toward the danger so others could survive. His body was never recovered. His department declared his end of watch on July 15, 2025 [56].

Two families are still waiting to bring their loved ones home — Cile Steward, age 8, and Jeffrey Ramsey, age 63. The search continues [33, 55].

We remember and support the survivors.

The ones who woke up in the middle of the night to water rising faster than they could think. The ones who made it and still don’t know how.

The parents who lost a child. The children who lost a parent. The extended family members who lost an entire portion of their family. The ones who lost one or more family members and friends. The ones who lost their friends and counselors at Camp Mystic. The ones who lost a student, a teacher, a camp director, a boss, or a colleague. The ones who lost their homes, businesses, cars and belongings. The children and young adults who have lost their innocence and sense of safety — about the memories they carry, about the power of a river and a storm, and about the world they thought they knew.

We remember the responders — every single person who has stepped in to carry the weight of the heartbreak and to lend a hand in recovery.

The rivers and the landscape are forever changed — and yet healing has already begun. Seeds embedded deep in the landscape are sprouting. People and organizations are rebuilding and replanting. The rivers are flowing. The sun rises again.

“No matter what or who you are grieving, everyone shares a need for their grief to be witnessed” — David Kessler [31].

Keeping the survivors and the ones we lost in mind, I offer you one final story.

Do you remember playing with a kaleidoscope as a child? It is a simple device — a tube with a viewfinder. When you look through the lens you see fragments of colored glass in different shapes. It might not look like much at first. When you twist the end of the tube, the image shifts. The colors and shapes rearrange themselves into something new. Something different. Something you couldn’t see before.

What starts as broken pieces of glass becomes something beautiful.

This is what healing looks like — from grief, from trauma, from a natural disaster. We are left with broken and missing pieces of our hearts, our minds, our lives — shattered and scattered. Slowly, over time, we begin to put the pieces back together. They will never fit the way they did before. Nothing will ever look the same as it did on July 3rd, 2025. But as we place the pieces into the kaleidoscope and turn the wheel — as individuals, as a community, as a region — things begin to look different. And eventually, we may find beauty in the colors and shapes that remain.

This is my hope for every single person touched by these floods.

References

Note: Numerical inline citations have been added and the reference list has been updated to a numerical format on June 28, 2026.

[1] Abbott, G. (2025, July 4). Disaster proclamation for Hill Country flood. Office of the Governor of Texas.

[2] Abbott, G. (2025, July 22). Governor Abbott amends and renews flooding disaster proclamation. Office of the Governor of Texas.

[3] Adams, Christopher and Kelly Wiley. “Flash Flooding Claimed More Than 130 Lives in Central Texas. Here’s What We Know About the Victims.” KXAN Austin, August 8, 2025.

[4] Allen, Jason. “Texas’ Camp Mystic Hopes New Flood Warning System Will Prevent Future Catastrophes.” CBS News, December 11, 2025.

[5] Amestoy, Louis. “The Monster in the Canyon: What the Storm Actually Was and What Was Never Asked.” Kerr County Lead, April 30, 2026.

[6] Amestoy, Louis, and Dean, Jennifer. “The Narrative Was That State Resources Were in Kerr County Before the Flood, But No One Asked How Many.” Kerr County Lead, June 7, 2026.

[7] Baron, Jonathan, and John C. Hershey. “Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 4 (1988): 569-579.

[8] Benz, Jennifer. “Stronger Together: How Social Resources Influence Disaster Recovery Outcomes.” NORC at the University of Chicago / AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, May 2025.

[9] Blackford, Andrew and Chelsea Aaron. “Guadalupe River Flood Tragedy.” NASA Earthdata Dashboard Stories, University of Alabama in Huntsville, July 17, 2025.

[10] Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

[11] Brady, K., Gibbs, L., & Harms, L. (2021). Hierarchies of affectedness after disasters. Health & Place, 72, 102687.

[12] Brolley, Tara and Walton, Farrah. “Kerr County Lawmaker Urges Abbott to Call Special Session on Youth Camp Safety Laws.” CBS Austin, April 30, 2026.

[13] Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. Treatment Improvement Protocol Series No. 57. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014.

[14] DeMillo, Andrew, Sarah Raza, Heather Hollingsworth, Kathy McCormack, and Sophia Tareen. “Teen Who Helped Family Escape from Van Is Among Those Killed in Texas Floods.” Associated Press, July 11, 2025.

[15] Doka, Kenneth J. “Disenfranchised Grief and Non-Death Losses.” Chapter 2 in Non-Death Loss and Grief: Context and Clinical Implications, edited by Darcy L. Harris. New York: Routledge, 2020.

[16] Erikson, Kai T. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.

[17] Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Kerr County Texans Affected by Severe Storms and Flooding July 2 and Continuing.” FEMA Press Release, July 6, 2025.

[18] Federal Emergency Management Agency. National Disaster Recovery Framework. Updated May 14, 2025.

[19] Garrett, Casey. Testimony before the Joint General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events, Texas Legislature, 89th Legislature, Second Called Special Session. April 27, 2026. Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, YouTube.

[20] Garza, Rocky, Daniela Ibarra, Gabby Jimenez, and Spencer Heath. “Man Found Dead After Vehicle Swept Away by Floodwaters Near Sabinal, Uvalde Fire Officials Say.” KSAT San Antonio, July 17, 2025.

[21] Gillette, Sam. “4 Friends, Including High School Sweethearts, Planned for Fun Weekend Before Texas Floods. 1 Is Still Missing.” People, July 10, 2025.

[22] Hanna, Tamara L. “Survivor’s Guilt vs. Survivor’s Grief.” The Porch, November 5, 2024.

[23] Hastings, Charlie. Kerr County Commissioners Court Meeting. July 21, 2025.

[24] Hope for the Guadalupe. Documentary film. Directed by Ben Masters. Produced by Josh Winkler. Fin and Fur Films, 2025.

[25] Hughes, Amber. “River Sentry Flood Warning Sirens Installed Along Guadalupe River.” Spectrum News 1, May 13, 2026.

[26] Janoff-Bulman, R. (2002). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma (Updated ed.). Free Press.

[27] Kerr County Deserves Answers [KerrCounty119]. “320 days.” Facebook, May 19, 2026.

[28] Kerr Together Long-Term Recovery Group. “Kerr Together: A Unified Hub for Disaster Recovery.”

[29] Kessler, David. Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Scribner, 2019.

[30] Kessler, David. “How to Heal Your Grief by Changing Your Story.” Commune, YouTube, June 27, 2023.

[31] Kessler, David. “No matter what or who you are grieving, everyone shares a need for their grief to be witnessed.” Instagram, @iamdavidkessler, August 16, 2024.

[32] Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (1970). On grief and grieving: Finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of loss. Scribner.

[33] Kumar, Atirikta. “Texas Identifies the 119 People Killed in Kerr County Floods.” The Texas Tribune, August 8, 2025.

[34] Langford, Terri and Dan Keemahill. “Did Fiscal Conservatism Block Plans for a New Flood Warning System in Kerr County?” The Texas Tribune, July 10, 2025.

[35] Larson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. Crown Publishers, 1999.

[36] Lifton, R. J. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House, 1967.

[37] Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695-706.

[38] Marquez, R., & Patton, M.C. (2019, May 23). 4 years ago today, ‘tidal wave of water’ hit Wimberley, causing catastrophic flooding. KSAT.

[39] Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. Rapid Mental Health Needs Assessment. May 2026.

[40] Molendijk, T. (2025). A contextual model of moral injury: Redefining trauma in frontline professions through ethics and context. Work, Employment and Society, 40(3).

[41] Moore, Andrew. “Gov. Abbott Signs Bill to Provide Nearly $300 Million in Flood Disaster Relief. Some of That Money Will Pay for Flood Sirens.” KENS5, September 18, 2025.

[42] National Weather Service. “July 2025 Texas Flooding Events.” NWS StoryMap Collection, 2025.

[43] Neimeyer, Robert A. “Finding Meaning in Grief.” Interview by Lesel Dawson. The Grief Channel, YouTube, September 27, 2022.

[44] Neimeyer, R.A. (Ed.) (2001). Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. American Psychological Association.

[45] Nguyen, Alex. “New Legislative Committees Will Probe July Fourth Floods.” The Texas Tribune, October 13, 2025.

[46] NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. “Weather Whiplash in Texas: Drought to Flood.” Posted August 11, 2025.

[47] O’Connor, Mary-Frances. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. New York: HarperOne, 2022.

[48] O’Connor, Mary-Frances, and Andrew Huberman. “Healing from Grief and Loss.” Huberman Lab, Scicomm Media, YouTube, June 2, 2025.

[49] Pearlman, Laurie Anne, and Karen W. Saakvitne. Trauma and the Therapist: Countertransference and Vicarious Traumatization in Psychotherapy with Incest Survivors. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

[50] Pitcho, Shani. “Surviving Grievers of Traumatic Loss: A Dialectical Approach to Survivor Guilt Management.” Death Studies, 2025.

[51] Ramirez, Marc. “’She Saved My Life’: Houston Woman Lost to Texas Flooding Was Selfless to the End.” USA Today, July 9, 2025, updated July 10, 2025.

[52] Rebuild Kerr. “Welcome to RebuildKerr.org.” Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country.

[53] Robson, Patricia, and Tony Walter. “Hierarchies of Loss: A Critique of Disenfranchised Grief.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 66, no. 2 (2012): 97-119.

[54] Roese, Neal J., and Kathleen D. Vohs. “Hindsight Bias.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 5 (2012): 411-426.

[55] Saldana, Sean. “Two Remain Missing from the July 4 Floods. Rangers Are Using Several Strategies to Find Them.” Texas Standard, December 1, 2025.

[56] Sather, L. & Bell, J. (2025, September 24). Search ends for Marble Falls VFD chief swept away in July floodwaters. KVUE.

[57] Schwager, Adam. “Hill Country to Lawmakers: Focus on Kerr County’s 119, Not Just Camp Mystic.” CW39 Houston, April 21, 2026.

[58] Seeburger, Frank. “Robert J. Lifton.” Trauma and Philosophy (blog). University of Denver.

[59] Simpson, S. (2026, May 18). Texas summer camps are closing or scaling back after new state regulations. Texas Tribune.

[60] Simpson, Stephen. “Texas Agency Lifts Camp Safety Rule Made After Flood.” The Texas Tribune, May 5, 2026.

[61] Simpson, Stephen. “Texas Hill Country Floods Are Worsening Mental Health Issues.” The Texas Tribune, January 29, 2026.

[62] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “Disaster Distress Helpline Provides Immediate Crisis Counseling for People Affected by Flash Flooding in Texas.” SAMHSA Press Announcement, July 7, 2025.

[63] Szuhany, Kristin L., Matteo Malgaroli, Carly D. Miron, and Naomi M. Simon. “Prolonged Grief Disorder: Course, Diagnosis, Assessment, and Treatment.” Focus, 19, no. 2 (2021): 161-172.

[64] Teitz, Liz. “Texas Floods: Kerr County, Guadalupe River Recovery.” San Antonio Express-News, December 15, 2025.

[65] Texas Division of Emergency Management. “July Flooding 25-0026.” Accessed 2026.

[66] Texas Health and Human Services Commission. “Disaster Behavioral Health Services.” Accessed 2026.

[67] Texas Health and Human Services Commission. “Gov. Abbott, HHSC Announce Texas Flooding Emotional Support Line.” HHSC News Release, July 2025.

[68] Texas House of Representatives. “Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events, General Investigating.” HR 177, 89th Legislature, Second Called Special Session. Texas House of Representatives Committee Portal.

[69] Texas House of Representatives. “Joint Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding.” Texas House of Representatives Committee Portal.

[70] Texas Legislature. House Bill 1, Youth Camp Alert, Mitigation, Preparedness, and Emergency Response (Youth CAMPER) Act. 89th Legislature, 2nd Called Special Session. Signed September 5, 2025.

[71] Texas Legislature. Senate Bill 1, Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act. 89th Legislature, 2nd Called Special Session. Signed September 5, 2025.

[72] Texas Legislature Online. “Public Comments: The July 2025 Flooding Events, General Investigating Committee, April 28, 2026.” 89th Legislature.

[73] Texas Legislature Online. “Witness List: The July 2025 Flooding Events, General Investigating Committee, April 28, 2026.” 89th Legislature.

[74] Texas Policy Research. “General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events.” Texas Policy Research Legislative Committees. Accessed 2026.

[75] Texas Senate. “Joint Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding.” Texas Senate Committee Portal.

[76] Texas Senate. “Senate General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events.” Texas Senate Committee Portal.

[77] Texas Senate General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events & Texas House General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events. (2026, June 26). Report on the Camp Mystic flood disaster of July 4, 2025 (corrected version). Texas Legislature.

[78] TPR Staff. “Camp Mystic Hearings Test Accountability and Due Process.” Texas Policy Research, April 29, 2026.

[79] TPR Staff. “SB 2: Relating to Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Recovery.” Texas Policy Research, 89th Legislature, 2nd Special Session.

[80] Truitt, Kate, PhD. Keep Breathing: A Psychologist’s Intimate Journey Through Loss, Trauma, and Rediscovering Life.

[81] U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Inspector General. “Review of the National Weather Service’s Actions to Support Kerr County During the Catastrophic Flash Flood in Texas.” Report No. OIG-26-017-I. April 9, 2026.

[82] USGS National Water Information System, Guadalupe River at Hunt gauge, site no. 08165500.

[83] Van der Kolk, Bessel, MD. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

[84] Vasquez, Lucio. “New Texas Flood Warning System Could Give Hill Country Communities Hours to Prepare.” Houston Public Media, May 5, 2026.

[85] Vasquez, Lucio. “’Throw Me the Baby’: Floodwaters Took a Family and His RV Park Before His Eyes.” KUT / The Texas Newsroom, July 12, 2025.

[86] Viner, Russell, Simon Russell, Rosella Saulle, et al. “School Closures During Social Lockdown and Mental Health, Health Behaviors, and Well-being Among Children and Adolescents During the First COVID-19 Wave: A Systematic Review.” JAMA Pediatrics 176, no. 4 (2022): 400-409.

[87] Walsh, M. E., Dalton, M., & Truitt, K. (2025, July 19). Thematic analysis of resilient targets as identified by patients engaging in NeuroTriad Model therapy [Poster presentation]. The Medical Family Therapy Intensive Conference, St. Paul, MN.

[88] Zunin, Leonard M. and Diane Myers. “Training Manual for Human Service Workers in Major Disasters.” SAMHSA/DHHS, 2000.

About the Author

Leslie Marchand, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist, life coach, and author sharing clinical insight and lived experience about grief, burnout, life transitions, and the everyday practice of living well.