On August 18, 2026, a shooting at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University junior-high campus in Zamboanga City left two students dead and others injured. The incident has prompted renewed questions about school safety, child protection and the mental-health needs of students who experience violence.
Tonight, I do not want to write about wellness.
I do not want to write about better sleep, nourishing food, preventive care, movement, resilience, longevity, or any of the things we spend our days telling one another will help us live better.
Tonight, I want to write about children.
Children who went to school because that is what children are supposed to do.
Children who should have been thinking about classes, friends, lunch, homework, the next thing they would laugh about, the next thing they would complain about, the next ordinary hour of a perfectly ordinary day.
And instead, some of them found themselves running for their lives.
Tonight, before the investigations and the hearings and the institutional reviews, I want to sit for a while with the children.
They Were Just Children
We know so little about a child’s inner world.
There is always a private space inside every child that adults cannot completely enter.
There are fears they don’t tell us.
Embarrassments they carry home silently.
Things they think about at night.
Questions they don’t know how to ask.
And also, there are enormous capacities for joy inside them.
A child can spend an entire afternoon laughing over something that an adult would not even remember.
A child can believe tomorrow will be wonderful simply because today was.
That is what makes the loss of a child so difficult to comprehend.
It is not only a life that has ended.
It is a future that has disappeared.
A person who would have grown taller.
Who would have fallen in love.
Who might have become a doctor, a teacher, an artist, an engineer, a parent.
Or none of those things.
Perhaps they would have become something none of us could have imagined.
We will never know.
And that is part of the grief.
The Terrible Vulnerability of Being Human
We spend so much of our lives trying to make the world safe.
We put locks on doors, hire guards, install cameras.
And teach children emergency procedures and rehearse what to do when something goes wrong.
All of this matters.
But somewhere beneath all those systems is a truth we find almost unbearable:
We cannot control everything.
Yes, we cannot stand beside our children every minute of every day, cannot anticipate every act of another human being, cannot know every thought that passes through another person’s mind.
We cannot build a world in which nothing terrible ever happens.
This is the most frightening part of being alive.
We love people in a world we cannot completely control.
And every parent understands, at some level, the terrifying bargain hidden inside that love.
We let our children go, let them walk into classrooms, let them board buses, and let them grow up.
We trust other adults to care for them, trust institutions, trust society.
Then we trust tomorrow.
Most days, that trust is rewarded.
Today, for some families, it was shattered.
What Do We Do With That Kind of Sadness?
I don’t know.
We have psychologists who can explain trauma.
Neuroscientists who can explain what fear does to the brain.
Researchers who can study violence.
Experts who can examine school security, firearm access, adolescent behavior, social media and suicide.
All of that knowledge is valuable.
We should use it.
We should learn everything we can from this tragedy so that another family may one day be spared this kind of phone call.
But there is a point beyond explanation.
There is a place where a mother does not need a theory.
She needs her child.
A father does not need a framework for grief.
He needs the person who was supposed to come home.
A classmate does not need a lecture on resilience.
She may simply need someone to sit beside her while she cries.
And perhaps this is something we have forgotten in our relentless pursuit of solutions.
Not every human wound needs to become an intellectual problem before it can be held.
Sometimes grief needs company.
For the Children Who Were There
I think about the children who survived.
The ones who ran, the ones who hid, those who heard things they should never have had to hear.
The ones who may be afraid to return to school.
And the ones who may suddenly become frightened by an ordinary hallway, a classroom door, a loud noise, a backpack dropping to the floor.
They may look fine tomorrow, they may laugh, or complain about homework.
They may ask for their phones, they may seem completely themselves.
And then, weeks from now, something small may bring the day back.
Trauma is insidious.
They will need adults who understand that recovery is not a straight line.
They will need patience.
And they deserve truthful, age-appropriate answers.
Most of all, they will need to know something simple:
The adults are still here.
And For the Child Who Did This
There is a difficult truth here, too.
The life that was taken matters.
The families who are grieving matter.
The children who were frightened matter.
Accountability matters.
So does the truth.
But we should also mourn what has been lost in the child who became capable of doing this.
Forgiveness of his actions may be elusive tonight.
Because somewhere along the way, a human life became profoundly broken, and whatever led to that point was not stopped.
We do not yet know the full story.
We should not blame bullying, games, mental illness, parenting, academic pressure, social media or anything else simply because we need an explanation.
Human behavior is rarely that simple.
There will be time for investigation.
Tonight, there is only sorrow.
A World That Is Sometimes So Sad
This is what troubles me most as someone who spends her days thinking about wellness.
We talk about taking charge of our health as though life can be carefully managed into goodness.
Eat well.
Sleep enough.
Exercise.
Manage stress.
Build meaningful relationships.
Get your checkups.
Protect your mental health.
And yes, all of these things matter.
But then something happens that none of those habits could have prevented.
A child goes to school and a terrible decision is made.
A family receives a phone call that divides life into before and after.
And suddenly all our beautiful language about wellness feels terribly small.
Maybe because wellness never meant nothing bad will happen.
It cannot promise us safety, nor bargain with fate.
It cannot guarantee that the people we love will always come home.
Maybe wellness means something more humble.
Funny how just a few nights ago I am thinking of having wellness defined by readers.
Now the answers are overwhelming.
Wellness means learning how to remain human in a world that can sometimes be unbearably cruel.
It means knowing how to care for one another when there is nothing clever to say.
It means recognizing when someone is hurting.
Also, wellness means making schools safer.
It means securing weapons and taking threats seriously.
It means giving children places where they can speak without humiliation.
And building mental-health systems that people can actually reach.
It means teaching children that asking for help is an act of courage.
It means refusing to become numb simply because terrible things happen too often.
Tomorrow, the Sun Will Still Rise
And here is the part I almost don’t want to say because it sounds too simple.
Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise.
It will touch the buildings in Zamboanga, and will fall across empty desks.
It will shine through classroom windows.
Its rays will hurt the eyes of parents who did not sleep.
It will shine on children who are frightened to return.
It will warm those people who will spend tomorrow trying to put pieces of a shattered day back into some kind of order.
The sun will not explain anything.
It will not make what happened acceptable.
It will not bring anyone back.
But it will rise.
One day, that might be enough.
Not tomorrow.
Maybe not next week.
Maybe not for a long time.
But one day, a child who survived will walk outside and feel the warmth on her face.
A teacher will hear laughter again in a hallway.
A parent will watch a child leave for school and feel fear, but also trust.
Someone will plant a tree.
Someone will make coffee.
Another will sing.
Another will get married.
And someone will laugh at something completely ridiculous.
None of these ordinary things will diminish the children who are gone.
Life continuing is not a betrayal of the dead.
It is the living carrying them forward.
For the Children
So tonight, I don’t want to ask the children who are gone to teach us a lesson.
They were supposed to have futures.
They were supposed to have more birthdays.
More school days.
More arguments with their parents.
A folder of embarrassing photographs.
Solid friendships.
Mistakes.
Chances to discover who they were going to become.
We failed them in the most fundamental way imaginable: they were not protected from a violence that should never have reached them.
That is beyond changing tonight.
But let us refuse to let their deaths become just another terrible story that passes through our screens before we scroll to the next thing.
We can remember that they were not headlines.
They were children who had names.
They had people waiting for them.
For they belonged to someone.
They mattered.
And so, tonight, the best thing we can do is stay close to one another.
Put the phone down.
Do not watch the video again.
Call someone you love.
Sit beside your child.
Hold your mother’s hand.
Tell someone, I’m glad you’re here.
If you are frightened, say so.
If you are sad, don’t apologize.
And if you don’t understand any of this, you don’t have to pretend that you do.
Sometimes all we can do is be together in the unbearable uncertainty of being alive.
Like Pooh beside Piglet, we do not always need to know how the story ends.
Sometimes we only need someone beside us to say:
I’m here.
Let’s walk together.
We’ll figure out what to do next.
And when morning comes, we step outside.
We let the sun touch our faces.
We breathe.
And we look at the world that is still here.
It is a sad, sad world.
But it is not only sad.
There are still children laughing.
There are still hands reaching for other hands.
And people trying to protect one another.
There is still kindness, music, breakfast.
There is still a sky.
And there is still tomorrow.
For the children who will never see it,
we owe it to them to make it a little kinder.
*Photo by RANIT SARKAR on Unsplash
