I had it all planned out: a post with continued FAQs on the 31-minute challenge that encourages you to pursue your dreams was almost ready to go today. I am sorry, but I find I cannot write about chasing dreams. Not this week, not when, following the horrific events of last Friday, twenty children had barely started dreaming. And now they never can.

Six-year-old Charlotte Bacon had wanted to become a veterinarian since age 2, according to the media. Olivia Engel, 6, reports say, was a math whiz, and loved reading.  Dylan Hockley, 6, loved garlic bread, trampoline, and playing his Wii games. Victoria Soto, 27, a first-grade teacher, died shielding her students. According to her teacher’s bio, quoted by NBC, she loved reading books on the beach and “soaking up the sun.”

The unfairness of it, I think that’s what got to me — to all of us, I’m sure.

When I first found out, I wished I could full-out cry. Instead, tears prickled at the edges of my eyes and a heavy lump settled in my throat. When my daughter came home from school, I grabbed her and held her — and held her — and held her. My daughter is a third-grader, who just turned nine a week ago. I just kept thinking, it could have been her, it could have been her, it could have been her. “Let go!” she complained, laughing.

When, an hour later, we were driving on an errand, the kids started bickering, and then before we knew it, peace was restored as easy as that, and we were joking around. My middle-schooler son was laughing, and for a moment there it felt so nice, to just not think of it, to pretend it was another Friday, another unseasonably warm December day, another present we get to unwrap all together. Then I looked up at the glowing orange disk of the sun marking the end of this day so brilliantly, and it hit me all over again. The beauty of everything they were robbed of. The twenty little children, and their six teachers, too. All the sunsets they will never see.

I am lucky. I’ve known it for a while now; don’t need tragedy to remind me. I get to go on with my life.

I am spoiled. I am not good at grieving.

This weekend I laughed; I walked under the rain; I wrote thousands of words; I played monsters with my kids. We went to see the Hobbit in the movies, something one of the victims, a 30-year-old teacher Lauren Gabrielle Rousseau was apparently planning to do with her boyfriend that night (I’ve just learned). These simple, wonderful everyday things all became selfish acts of defiance after what happened on Friday.

I wish I could wrap this post up with a neat conclusion, a comforting thought, an insightful explanation. I don’t have any. Do you?

I wish I could do something. All I feel is small and numb. I don’t know what to do, except, honor those beautiful lives for every good thing they’ve left to those who knew them in their too-short time in this world. I don’t know what to do, except honor the goodness in all of us. And hold my children a little tighter.