My son and I were visiting his cousins when it happened. My husband, at home in Los Angeles, called me early Saturday morning with the news. I felt the same shock thousands of others were feeling in my town. The sun didn’t come out Saturday. The cloud cover was literally the pall we all felt.

But I have a child and he has young cousins. So I took them to breakfast by the beach and then I took them on the beach and we found a large crab shell, pointed at dolphins just off shore, and ran like crazy. So I took them to the Sea Center on the pier and despite having been there a million times the children eagerly studied shark egg sacs through a microscope, put on a marine puppet show in the booth provided by the center, and for about 5 minutes my son explained to me that sperm whales dive deep and eat giant squid and have scars on their bodies from fighting the squid.

In the gift shop, the salesgirl asked me how I was. I just had a feeling she was a college student and I asked her how she was holding up. She immediately told me she lived in Isla Vista, had heard the gun shots just as she was sitting down to eat dinner, knew people who were killed by the ‘lunatic’. “I’m in shock,” she told me. “It’s a nightmare.”

The children didn’t hear any of this. I told the salesgirl to take good care.

Later, we walked my son and his cousins over to the Santa Barbara Mission to look at the iMadonnari chalk ‘paintings’ in progress. The paintings were beautiful, filled with positive messages celebrating our planet. It was dusk. The mission glowed serenely in its lighting. From the top steps, we could see all the way down through the city to darkening ocean.

On the steps, I closed my eyes and sent a prayer, a feeling, a bit of light, as much as I could muster.