Jennifer was preparing to take an accounting exam when she saw a report on the business center’s television that would change her life.

Jennifer, who is being identified by her first name because of concerns for her family’s safety, is a senior and accounting major at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her mother brought her to the United States from Honduras when she was 7 years old. Her mother had left to find work in America when Jennifer was 3 years old.

“I just knew that I was finally going to be with my mom,” she said.

A bright and studious kid, she adjusted and did well in school in Ballwin, Missouri. In her sophomore year of high school, she asked her mother for her social security number so she could apply for an internship. Her mother told her she didn’t have legal papers; she was undocumented.

“That’s when I found out I was very limited in what I could do. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work legally,” Jennifer said.

All of a sudden, the country she had grown up in wasn’t hers anymore. The place she knew as her home, where she had dreams to go to college, became a place she had to hide who she was. She couldn’t even tell her closest friends.

The next year, President Barack Obama signed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) into law after waiting for Congress to act on behalf of young children who had been brought to and raised in America without legal documents. What is a small child supposed to do when their parent moves them to another country? How do you tear a young person away from their family and home to deport them to a country where they have no connections, no family and may not even speak the language? Especially if they weren’t even responsible for coming here illegally in the first place?

Jennifer immediately filed for the legal protection DACA offered. She gave all her information, paid the fee and passed a background check. Even though there was no path to becoming a citizen, it allowed her to stay, study and work here legally. It had to be renewed every two years. It gave her a measure of her dignity back.

“I was no longer hiding a part of myself,” she said.

Jennifer graduated from high school and got accepted into the Honors College at UMSL. She works two jobs to help pay for her education. She will be graduating in May and planned to attend networking events with accounting firms to find a job.

Then she saw the news that President Donald Trump had rescinded DACA, effective in six months. Trump has asked Congress to handle the issue. If they are unable to pass legislation, students like Jennifer face deportation by the federal agencies they gave their personal information and fingerprints to in good faith.

Even though she had prepared herself, she was still in shock when she watched Attorney General Jeff Sessions make the announcement. For a second, she felt a flash of anger and resentment toward her mother. Why put her in this situation?

Immediately, she let it go.

“I’m not a mother. I can only imagine the struggle she went through,” she said. “It wasn’t the best decision, but it was the only option she had at that point. I can’t blame her for being a mother and wanting to protect me and for wanting to give me a better future. I can’t blame her for that.”

She had to pull herself together and take her accounting exam.

“I’m just scared,” she said. There are months ahead of just waiting while her entire future, all her hard work, hangs in the balance.

Even worse than the fear of losing her future is the pain of feeling like she isn’t wanted in the country she loves and considers her home.

“I’ve never in my life felt like I was less than a person,” she said. “Now, it’s like I’m not worth staying here.”

After she finished her exam, she drove back home to Ballwin.

Then she cried.

The morning after my hometown started drowning, I tried to divert myself from the images that were filling me with dread. Helplessness is the feeling I’m least equipped to handle, and the worst kind of helplessness is watching someone you love being hurt or in danger and being unable to do anything.

So I joined a few friends and went to an international festival in St. Louis. It was a gorgeous day here. The sun was shining. Everything was dry. It felt completely surreal.

I was glued to the updates on my phone. My social media feeds filled with pleas for help and dire alerts that things were only going to get worse. When I received texts that my parents were in their kitchen pantry taking shelter from a possible tornado in their Houston neighborhood, I left the festival immediately.

There were two different worlds that day: a normal -- dry -- life around me, and the one hundreds of miles away where my parents, relatives and childhood friends could be submerged under water at any moment. When a catastrophe unfolds in a place you’ve lived, when the people being rescued are your relatives and friends, when you’ve driven down all the roads that have turned into rivers, your heartbreak and disbelief are commingled with fear and guilt.

Those who have lived through a natural disaster know how hard it is to make sense of what is happening around you. One minute your house is there; the next minute, it’s uninhabitable.

It was impossible to tear myself away from the crisis unfolding 800 miles away.

I watched videos on Facebook of my friend and her newborn being rescued by good Samaritans on kayaks. I posted on Twitter when a relative and her two children were trapped in her home with rising water. First responders from the sheriff’s department got them to safety. Another friend swam out of her house and down her street with her children in life jackets.

And the rain wouldn’t relent.

“Now I have an idea of how Noah felt when everything drowned in front of him,” a friend posted.

When so many people you know have lost so much, where do you begin to help? Besides the scale of devastation in our country’s fourth-largest city, the prolonged sense of crisis sets this storm apart. Harvey dumped nearly a year’s worth of rain in a matter of days over the city, and each day, new threats emerged -- whether it was tornado warnings or reservoirs overflowing or power failures. People were being told to evacuate without any clear idea of how to do so, when so many roads and highways were impassable.

We watched on live television as millions of Americans remained trapped and desperate for help for so long.

All we could do from afar was make donations to organizations helping on the ground, share that information and encourage others to do the same. The constant sense of urgency during those days made it even more infuriating to read tone-deaf, heartless tweets while so many struggled to survive.

Those idiotic tweets were overshadowed by the countless ordinary people who performed heroic acts of courage to save strangers. Thousands of lives were saved by people who rushed toward rising waters to save someone in trouble.

The best of humanity reveals itself in our darkest moments.

Reports suggest that more than 80 percent of the homeowners affected by the floods in Texas do not have flood insurance. Among those who lost everything will be some who lived through the same nightmare 12 years ago in Hurricane Katrina. Most people will need to rebuild their lives with very little.

The rest of us may have felt our hands tied during this epic catastrophic disaster. But now the cleanup begins.

It’s time to get all hands on deck.

Want to help Hurricane Harvey’s flood victims? Here are some reputable organizations:

-- The Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund: ghcf.org/hurricane-relief

-- The Houston Food Bank: houstonfoodbank.org

-- The Coastal Bend Disaster Recovery Group: CoastalBendCan.org/CBDRG

-- The Texas Diaper Bank: texasdiaperbank.org

-- The Coalition for the Homeless: homelesshouston.org

-- Portlight: portlight.org

I was awestruck, scrolling through photos of the eclipse on my Facebook feed, when I discovered I had to be at a funeral in a few hours.

A friend’s mother had just died. In the Islamic tradition, the deceased are buried as quickly as possible. She had passed away that afternoon and would be laid to rest before sunset. I went from the thrill of this wondrous celestial event to the sad awareness of parents getting older -- the phases of the moon, the cycle of the sun bringing to mind the shortening time we have left with our loved ones.

Nowadays, social media is how we find out about deaths among those in our wider social circles. Tragedy strikes in between first-day-of-school pictures and vacation sunsets. We get startling reminders of human fragility, of how quickly things can change. One minute we are clicking on the laughing face reaction at some silly meme, and the next click is a teardrop face on someone’s heartache.

Most of our modern communication happens via short written messages, even the most personal and tragic. A few days earlier, we had gotten word by text of another death: One of my husband’s high school friends lost his 17-year-old son after an accidental shooting.

Many of us remember when this kind of news was more commonly delivered through a phone call or a knock on the door. There are a few calls burned in my memory: the deaths of my grandparents and a best friend from high school.

In this case, the text gave us a minute to absorb the blow. When we went to that young man’s visitation a few days later, his parents had that shell-shocked look that I’ve only seen when parents have to bury a child. We offered our respects the only way we could -- by showing up, by bearing witness to their pain and praying for their healing.

I was still thinking about those grieving parents when I went to pray with yet another family, still completely raw in their own grief.

Even though the ways we hear about death are new, the ways we deal with it are very old. Mourning is our way to make peace with death. Rituals offer a chance at closure, a way to find meaning and comfort in the most difficult and painful moments.

In the space of five days, I observed Christian and Muslim funeral traditions. A few of the differences in custom were related to timing and social etiquette. The most jarring difference, however, had nothing to do with religious belief: One service marked the natural order of life when adult children lose a parent. The other was an unnatural and heartbreaking disruption of that cycle.

It made me consider: What happens when rituals bring no closure? When, instead, there is the devastation of unanswered questions? Why did a teenager get fatally shot by a friend after they found a gun in a park? Why are there so many tragic stories of senseless loss?

What happens when, instead of peace, there is searing pain that hits even more brutally when everyone leaves?

In social media, everything is instant. We look for instant gratification when we share. We react, we respond, we get validation from keystrokes. It’s an efficient and controlled way to communicate.

Mourning is messy. Grief takes its time.

It seemed that in a second, the moon blotted the sun. It blocked a brightness so intense that all we saw was a ring of fire. And then, slowly and surely, the light returned.

Reminding us that darkness doesn’t last forever.