ArcaMax

On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico on what's now the White Sands Missile Range. About 40 miles away from the Trinity test site, a group of girls at a dance camp were thrown from their bunks in the explosion. Thinking a water heater had exploded, they ran outside and saw a strange summer snow falling around them.

One of the girls, Barbara Kent, later said that they danced in the nuclear fallout, rubbing it on their faces and trying to catch the flakes as they fell.

"We were all having such a good time," Kent told The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Of the 12 girls at the camp that year, Kent said only two lived to be 40 years old. Her mother, also at the camp, died of cancer, as did the camp dance teacher and the teacher's daughter. Kent was diagnosed with four kinds of cancer herself.

When I read about Camp Mystic and the cataclysmic flooding at the Texas camp that took the lives of dozens of girls -- many as young as 8 -- I somehow think about Barbara Kent and her fellow campers, too.

Separated by 80 years and circumstance, they have commonalities. In both cases, the victims were little girls, away from home, who were spending the summer in innocent joy when their respective tragedies struck.

In both situations, there's truckloads of blame to share, but in neither situation does the blame do those children any good. Blame the flood alert system, blame the way nuclear bombs were tested, blame the buildings on a flood plain, blame anyone and everyone you like, but the damage has been done.

The only worthwhile question in the immediate aftermath of this horror: How do we make sense of it?

People like to say that God works in mysterious ways, but there's little charm in mysteries like these. I prefer an organizing principle, a way to create order from the chaos of misery. I hear that the camp was Christian, and I hope that the victims' family members can lean on their faith to provide some of the answers they need to move forward.

Because unlike the other beasts of the Earth, humans require meaning, a framework to hold up the seemingly random structure of their lives.

In the book "Man's Search for Meaning," the Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote that he experienced firsthand in a concentration camp how having meaning could literally save a person's life. In less extreme circumstances, it could shield someone's sanity.

I imagine the people who lost a child at Camp Mystic might need some help with their sanity right about now.

Whatever meaning those loved ones find, whether it be by establishing an animal welfare fund in their daughter's name, for example, by fighting for changes in disaster alerts or just simply by remembering a light that was extinguished too early -- well, that meaning is the just the right one.

Barbara Kent made it her mission to bring publicity to the downwind victims of the Trinity nuclear test, speaking over the years about the lack of U.S. government attention to the consequences of their irresponsible actions. It's only in recent years that her efforts, and those of others fighting for the same goal, have borne fruit.

Due to the work done by Kent, and others like her, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has been amended and extended many times, eventually to include the victims who were in New Mexico 80 years ago.

Would Kent have traded her impact on the world to have been somewhere else on that day in 1945? Would the parents of those young campers take back their precious children, no matter what the consequence? My guess is yes.

But we don't get to choose the events of our lives. We can only move them around in our minds afterward, like cards in a hand of poker, until they make sense.

It is not my task to impart upon anyone my beliefs about what gives their tragedies -- let alone their lives -- meaning. The Trinity victims and the parents of those little girls from Camp Mystic are the only ones whose opinions matter.

But when we pray for the families of the Texas flood victims, perhaps we should pray not that they repair (or even forget) the wound they've suffered, which seems an impossibility anyway. Our only hope might be that they eventually desire again to seek meaning in the madness.

It won't be anything like a silver lining, but perhaps a lifeline will do.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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