I was trying to build up the emotional wherewithal to watch the latest police shooting video circulating the internet.

Police officers shot and killed Alton Sterling outside a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, convenience store. When such a shooting looks unprovoked and unwarranted, the viewer could be witnessing a murder, one unlikely to result in any kind of prosecution.

I was trying to convince myself that it was necessary to be a witness to such incidents happening by a police force for which we collectively pay. Before I could click play, a suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, police officer killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop. Castile's girlfriend documented the aftermath through a video that spread through social media.

Again, I couldn't watch.

I read the words her 4-year-old daughter said to her mother, who was taken into police custody after seeing her boyfriend shot to death: "It's OK, Mommy. I'm right here with you."

I could hear a 4-year-old's voice.

My internal debate continued. When a system seems so entrenched and resistant to change, you should be a witness when it fails, I thought. Watching such footage should make us more upset, scared and hurt. We can channel those emotions to try to raise children with more empathy and compassion for all people. We can flash back to those images when we need courage to challenge a racist comment made in our presence.

While brutality and injustice have existed as long as humanity, the video documentation and its instant spread are relatively new.

I had nearly convinced myself to watch both videos when a sniper shot and killed five police officers in Dallas at a protest in response to the shootings.

More victims, more grief, more anger.

We were still reeling from this attack when another police officer was shot. This time it was a routine traffic stop in my own suburban St. Louis neighborhood. My children were playing outside when I saw the news. I called them inside and closed the garage door. I could hear news helicopters overhead.

At the time, we didn't know the condition of the officer or whether the suspect had been caught. (Ballwin Officer Michael Flamion suffered life-altering injuries and will need long-term care. Antonio Taylor faces felony charges after reportedly shooting him in the neck from the back.)

It feels different when random violence erupts in your immediate vicinity. Chaos and uncertainty are more destabilizing the closer they hit to home.

Later that day, I took baked goods to our neighbor who is a police officer to let him know we were praying for the officer and the department. I needed to feel a sense of community and show my children how people come together in tragedies.

But I wondered if my deliberate refusal to watch these events unfold undermined my desire to be part of the solution. I asked Vetta Sanders Thompson, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. She said it is important to be informed when wanting to have an honest conversation about what policing looks like in our society for all people. But also that no one should risk their mental health or well being.

"You have to take care of yourself," she said. "And other people don't know your limits."

Multiple exposures to such scenes of violence carry additional stress for people who are more vulnerable, she said. That includes people with a history of trauma, such as a sexual assault history, combat experience, a chronic stressor or health issue, or those living in a home or community with significant violence. These videos can make you feel more unsafe in the world than is necessary, she said.

Her comments made me think more deeply about why the thought of watching the videos provoked such anxiety for me. I have been up close to human tragedy in my years as a news reporter. I've covered countless funerals of victims of violence, and talked to families in their moments of raw grief. Those experiences take an emotional toll, but they don't feel traumatizing for me.

There were two incidents in my early 20s, however, that hit close to home. My best friend from high school was shot and murdered at her college in Texas by a fellow student. Six years later, my aunt in Pakistan was murdered, shot point-blank, by an intruder. In the case of my friend, a beautiful girl from an affluent family, justice was swift. Her killer was convicted and executed. My aunt's killer was never found. The Pakistani police hardly investigated her case. It was extremely low priority: She was a politically unconnected, ordinary, stay-at-home mom.

Their deaths impacted me in ways others had not. Though I don't think of either of them when I see reports of mass shootings or gunshot victims, they affected how I perceive justice in the world.

Emotions connected to traumatic life events can lie dormant below the surface. Memories lurk in our subconscious.

Once I realized that watching real-life violence likely touched those same buttons, I gave myself permission to scroll past the posts that said "Warning: Graphic Video."

But I will amplify the message: We must do better.

The only time I ever cried in a professor's office was near the end of a semester-long assignment. My angst had nothing to do with my grades or the approaching deadline.

It was the knowledge from the work that was breaking my heart.

Dr. Sussan Siavoshi, a political science professor at Trinity University, informed my class at the start of the semester that we would be required to subscribe to a newspaper and follow the news of any single foreign country for the entire term. Our research would culminate in a final paper.

I grew up in a household that prized its newspaper subscription, so I had been a casual consumer of news for as long as I could read. But like most Americans, I just skimmed the headlines of stories with international datelines. Many parts of the world only seemed to show up in stories related to war and conflict, and my eyes tended to glaze over the steady stream of bad news.

The former Yugoslavia was crumbling at the time. I chose Bosnia and Herzegovina for the assignment, fascinated by the region's history and the unrest in a multiethnic, multireligious society. I picked the Christian Science Monitor, then a daily paper with robust international coverage, as my news source.

I had a superficial understanding of the crisis unfolding in the Balkans. But once I started following the news vigilantly, I became emotionally entrenched in it. As luck would have it, I had subscribed to a publication that was heavily invested in covering my chosen country: The year I graduated college, David Rohde won the Monitor a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his reporting of the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica genocide.

It was the daily reading about the march toward this genocide, the growing support for ethnic cleansing, that was haunting me as a young college student.

My high school history class had been my introduction to the horrifying scale of human cruelty. I remember holding my head in my hands when I began to grasp the magnitude of the genocides detailed in our textbooks.

How could the world be letting this happen again?

That was the question that led me to my professor's office. I told her that I was having trouble sleeping. I felt helpless, hopeless, complicit and depressed from following this war so closely. She handed me a tissue and reached for one herself.

I don't remember what she said in response to my questions, but I do remember her compassion. I remember feeling like my grief over something unconnected to myself was legitimate. She gave me permission to ask difficult questions to which there were no easy answers.

The assignment was designed to teach us how to take a sustained interest in things outside our circle. The point was to learn to make connections -- global, historical, political and personal. This is how you teach young people to think about the world in an informed and critical way. In a time when universities are caught in a facilities arms race to attract students, they ought to remember that their most valuable assets are people.

For parents worried about which colleges will give their child the best shot in life: Look for the ones with professors who really care about their students. Relationships -- with their professors and their peers -- are transformative for students.

I turned in my term paper, and I added an international studies major after Siavoshi's class.

I recently found myself again in Siavoshi's office, again in a time of political turbulence. We had an unplanned, serendipitous meeting: She was on campus when I was picking up my daughter from a camp. We hadn't spoken since I had been her student, decades earlier.

I told her I was worried about terrorist attacks at home and abroad, and the political opportunism that sought to tear us apart rather than unite us during these uncertain and scary times. I shared my concerns about my own children, who would hopefully be college students one day.

Again, her wisdom and compassion comforted me.

Siavoshi said she reads the news rather than watching it on television. She knows when to disengage from reporting on tragedies and horror stories. She reminds herself of all the other groups who are vulnerable, remembering the power in building alliances. Sticking up for others is a way of sticking up for yourself.

We are not alone, she said, in our worries or our heartache about the pain in the world.

Twenty years later, I needed to hear that again.

One of my school friends met her future husband as a sophomore in high school. He was a senior, serious about his future, and he drove a fast car.

Cindy, a fun-loving and beautiful blonde, was wary of becoming too involved too fast. But they stayed together even when he went away to college. They got married shortly after she graduated from the University of Texas.

Her husband graduated from medical school, just as he had planned, and she taught special education for a few years before they started their own family. They moved across small towns in the southeast as opportunities arose for him.

No one was surprised that Cindy and Peter were the high school sweethearts who made it. One of our mutual friends even correctly predicted in high school that Cindy would end up being a stay-at-home mom with six children.

Among our crowd of misfit, bright students, Cindy seemed to be the one who would follow a well-planned life path.

She and Peter lived in a spacious house on four acres in South Carolina, and took their kids to Disney and on camping trips. Cindy's Facebook posts reminded me of Erma Bombeck books I read as a child. She wrote about her life with a sense of humor and openness. Even though I grew up in a family of six children, she was the only peer I knew who had taken on the challenges of raising a family that size -- from teens to toddlers under the same roof.

She thrived managing that chaos.

Peter worked the demanding hours of an emergency room physician but spent his free time with his family.

He was on a school field trip with his son's middle school class when a blood clot traveled to his lungs. He died before he reached the hospital. He was 43.

I saw the news when Cindy posted it on Facebook and called her soon after. If it seemed unreal to us, this new reality was unimaginable to her.

I saw her a few months after her husband died, when her grief was still raw. There wasn't much I could say. I mostly just listened and offered hugs. I've prayed for her and her children often.

She and her children have spent the past year picking up the pieces and trying to figure how to refit them without Peter.

When The Cure, a rock band from an earlier era in my life, announced its tour schedule last year, I texted my high school friends, now scattered around the country. Using a concert as an excuse for a reunion, we all traveled to a city away from our homes this summer.

When I had asked Cindy if she wanted to go, she wasn't sure if she would be ready to leave her kids for a weekend. But her family told her they would take care of things, so she came. It was her first trip without them, without Peter.

It had been nearly a year and a half since Peter's death.

He had taken her to her first big concert. It had been The Cure in the summer of 1992, when we had graduated high school.

This summer, we danced to songs that took us back decades to a time when most of us couldn't have imagined what paths lay ahead. The one that seemed the most steady and certain took the most significant sideways turn.

We talked about how Peter had been as a teenager, and we laughed as she told us stories about how he was a father and husband. She's shared moments when she's felt his presence and heard his voice so clearly. She wears her wedding band.

She looks for moments of joy amid the grief.

Cindy is one of those people who sends a long, entertaining Christmas letter every year that I love reading. She addressed the life-changing loss near the end of last year's note.

"I have had to learn and grow in so many ways," she wrote, and quoted Ecclesiastes 7:3: "Sorrow is better than laughter; it may sadden your face, but it sharpens your understanding."

"And I know so much now," she wrote. "I really know."

She reflected on the 24 years she and Peter spent together.

"We had a great love story. It's a story because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although his chapter has ended, ours will continue."