Lately I've been thinking I'm a little bit broken, or at least totally desensitized by my hours of watching murder TV-- not even the CSI/Law and Order kind, more Murder She Wrote.  (Which begs the question as to how there is anyone at all left in that small Maine town if everyone is either dead or in prison for deading somebody else.)
I feel horror at tragedies; I'm not some unfeeling zombie.  I just haven't raced to the school to pull my kids out when a shooting happens at another school.  I don't even squeeze them extra hard when they get home.  I talk to my kids about what has happened in hopefully age appropriate ways.  The problem with having kids so scattered in ages is that the older kids know about what is going on and want to talk about it.  The younger kids hear it and need to work through it too.  I kind of think it's like sex talks-- I want the conversation happening at home, where we can guide a conversation.
Sorry.  Side tracked.
Last night I had a nightmare (possibly from eating trifle late at night while reading about the devastation in OK) and it involved Heidi.  I woke up barely being able to breathe, not being able to banish what I saw and felt.  I went to the little girls' room.  I tucked freezing cold Alison back under her covers and grabbed Heidi, since her bed was so full of toys I couldn't lay down next to her.  I brought her to our bed and snuggled her all night. 
I've had bad dreams before involving my kids, but I usually spend some time calming down and go back to sleep.  In fact, this morning Heidi asked me why I got her up.  Why didn't I just pray and go back to sleep in my own bed?  That's what I make her do, after all.  I couldn't explain my need to have her with me right then.
I came to the realization as I was calming down that I'm not broken.  I'm not desensitized.  I am like a teenager who isn't aware of his own mortality and often acts accordingly. 
I AM aware of my children's mortality.  Just ask anyone who's ever watched me in the middle of the ferry with my eyes closed, rocking slightly as Dan and the kids cavort on the deck with sides that barely come up to my waist.  I have become such a chicken liver since having kids.  I am also aware and grateful for the protection we have received when things could have and should have gone terribly wrong.  Even when I'm blissfully unaware we've been protected, I am grateful.  I am pretty sure that's happened on one or more occasions.
I think it also stems from never seeing death as a tragedy (and this is probably because tragic deaths have only touched me peripherally). Usually, death isn't a tragedy.  It's going back to Heavenly Father and those who have gone on before.  It's an easement of old age and of suffering from disease.  I know that even in those deaths, there is a deep sense of loss and grief.  I do not know how people go through life without the gospel and a faith of better things to come.  I do not know.  I spent more time crying with and for the family of our sweet neighbor who passed away last spring because they didn't have a firm testimony of life after death, than I ever did when my own grandparents passed away.  They think they will be with him again, but they don't know for sure.  That's a tragedy.  It was one that was close to home and I felt it deeply. 
I am so abundantly blessed that sometimes I just need hard things to remind me that I have the capacity to feel pain.  I am inexpressibly grateful that last night's hard thing was a dream and not reality.