The confusion about wedding customs began before Robert even had a chance to propose to my sister.

He had arrived at my parents' home in a suit, after trying a case in court, wanting to make his intentions clear. They had already met a few times to discuss their concerns about the possible union. After all, Robert was a black man raised in Mississippi, and my sister had been raised in a Pakistani family in Houston. But Robert and my sister, Rabeea, who had known each other for seven years since law school, were pretty sure they had cleared those hurdles by now.

This meeting would just be a formality.

Robert sat on the sofa, and my father sat across the room in a chair. My mother, called ammi in Urdu, sat in a different corner. There was some polite small talk, and then the room became silent.

"I could hear the tick-tock from the clock," Robert said. "It seemed like you could hear a pin drop."

Finally, Robert said: "I would like to marry your daughter."

"In our culture, we have to talk to the family," my father started. "You have to meet the family; they have to get comfortable with you. Then they'll tell me what they think about you. Then, we'll let you know."

My mother looked at my father. This was not going as she expected.

Robert said it sounded like a good idea, and got up to leave.

Early the next morning, he got a call at work.

It was my father. My mother had told him to call and fix the situation he created.

"I just wanted to let you know that you did OK," my dad said. "Welcome to the family. We're so happy you're going to be our son."

Robert was a little confused, and called my sister, to whom he still had not proposed.

"Once you talk to the parents, you're engaged," she explained.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" he said. (He still had a ring and asked her privately, later.)

Now that they finally had everyone's blessing, they had a wedding to plan. Given the size of our immediate family, the date that worked for everyone was four short months away.

My mother hopped on a flight to Pakistan and set off to get nearly 50 outfits custom-made for the wedding, of which 23 were for the wedding party.

Robert's sisters and niece started researching traditional Pakistani wedding decorations and taught themselves a Bollywood dance for the party before the wedding.

Rabeea wanted the ceremony to reflect both cultures. There was a center aisle and a wedding party -- things familiar to Americans but not typically a part of South Asian weddings. The music ranged from R&B to Indian film songs. And she fought my parents about the menu at the reception: It was going to be pan-seared snapper with blackened chicken and etouffee sauce, rather than the traditional Pakistani cuisine familiar to them and our relatives.

There were compromises on both ends.

The Imam who performed the wedding told my sister he remembers looking into the crowd and seeing that one side of the aisle was African-American and the other Pakistani-American. The couple at the center united the room.

Looking back, there isn't a detail that either of them would change about their wedding, or the celebrations leading up to it.

"I was very, very happy that my family loved Robert, and his family loved me, and everyone was having a good time. I was happy and in love and excited," my sister said.

Robert remembers that phone call that started the ball rolling, from the man he had worked so hard to win over. My mom took the phone after my father and offered her congratulations.

Robert had asked: Can I call you ammi now?

Of course, he could.

He was family.

A young high school girl, blood pouring down her face from a bullet hole near her temple, laughed with her friends.

This was the picture that caught my eye.

She wasn't really injured. She's a member of the drama club at Troy Buchanan High School in the outskirts of suburban St. Louis. She and several other thespians volunteered last month to help recreate a school shooting as part of an active intruder drill. It gave school officials, teachers and first responders a chance to practice what would happen in such a worst-case scenario.

Principal Jerry Raines said it's the second active intruder drill at the high school and the 12th one in the district this year. The drills take place with adults and the students who are re-enactors, not the entire student body.

That's not necessarily the case in other districts around the country.

Masked "intruders," armed with guns, fired blanks at a group of teachers in a library in a rural Oregon school last year. A student at Central York High School in New Jersey writes about the deafening noise when armed police officers burst into her dark classroom to "rescue" the students during a realistic intruder drill. An El Paso district took it a step further with a surprise intruder drill so realistic that students sent panicked texts to parents.

Drills of any sort -- fire, tornado, earthquake -- are believed to save lives because they reduce the panic in an actual emergency. It makes sense to test systems, to make sure the school staff and police officials know what to do to protect students in any kind of emergency.

Shootings shouldn't seem as inevitable as the forces of nature, but these days, they do.

A recent Associated Press analysis finds that there have been at least 11 school shootings this academic year alone. That doesn't include colleges and universities, malls and movie theaters, where shooters have also opened fire.

So, how do we prepare our children to respond?

My fifth grader described what happens during a lockdown or intruder drill at her school.

"The teacher makes sure we are all lined up against the wall, where no one can see us. She rolls down paper on the windows and makes us stay silent until they say 'all clear,'" she explained. "I bet it's only 10 minutes, but it feels like an hour."

So, the defense we've given our children since massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook is very often: Turn off the lights, stay quiet and hide.

That's certainly easier than trying to make even the smallest reforms to the country's gun laws. Congress hasn't been able to pass gun control legislation on assault weapons and background checks, which the vast majority of Americans support, because of the power of the gun lobby. School security is an industry now, with trainers and equipment and realistic drills, meant to convince us that teaching children to dodge bullets at school is somehow a normal part of growing up.

Children of the '50s and '60s may remember air raid or 'duck and cover' drills to survive a possible atomic attack during the Cold War. If students saw a flash of light outside (possibly from a bomb), they were instructed to kneel under their desks with their hands over their heads and necks -- never mind the radiation fallout.

These days, no one practices surviving a nuclear attack. Our security rests on keeping such weapons out of the hands of madmen.

Today's parents didn't grow up rehearsing what to do if a classmate walked into their school firing rounds of bullets into the hallways. We didn't grow up with scenes of slain first-graders shot dead in their classrooms.

When our children get older and ask us what we did to best protect them from school shootings, we might tell them about more police officers in schools, metal detectors, surveillance cameras and intruder drills. But they might have a different answer for their own children. This generation, who is growing up with the threat of gun violence so real that they have recreated scenes from a horror movie for the sake of their own safety, may feel differently about the ease of access to the machines capable of such depravity.

When you have to imagine yourself getting shot, and your teacher hiding you -- year after year since you were 5 years old -- that creates some sort of impression. When a threat is so real to you that you can hear screams and shots fired and smell sweat during the trial runs, that changes a child's perception of his safety, despite the fact that schools remain one of the safest places for children.

If a homicidal young man armed with semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition breaks into a school, it's not a matter of whether any innocent people will die. It's a matter of how many.

That's the reality our children face.

I wasn't expecting an open casket.

My children and I walked into the room to see the mother lying lifeless, surrounded by those who loved her.

My son, then 6, tightened his grip on my hand when he glanced at the coffin. He needn't have worried. I wasn't headed anywhere near the young mother. It wouldn't have been appropriate to be any closer to the circle of grief around her.

We would have been strangers to Carolyn Dutta. My daughter, then 9 years old, played with her daughter on the playground at school. She was the only one of the three of us with the faintest connection to anyone in the room. And she was behaving as if this surreal moment was completely normal.

When I got the email from the school principal during Christmas break a few years ago, about the car accident that killed Carolyn and injured her daughter, I wondered how I would break the news to my daughter. I waited a week, until a day before the visitation.

"Maybe you could make your friend a card?" I said. She loved making cards for nearly any occasion.

She asked if she could write "We're so sorry about what happened" on the cover. I suggested she stick with "So sorry" on the front and write the note inside.

She carried the card tightly in her left hand, slightly crumpled in her grip.

When we walked into the funeral home, I realized there were few children among the hundreds of visitors. Esme, her friend who had been hurt in the accident, wasn't there when we arrived. I told my daughter we would find a relative to deliver the card to her friend.

News reports described Carolyn as a devoted, energetic mom, who loved to cook and play with her three young children.

"Picture Mother Teresa on roller skates, moving very fast," is how her sister described her, according to reports after the funeral.

Carolyn had been 44 when a drunk driver killed her during a family trip in Canada. Her husband, Suman, would be raising Esme, 8, Liam, 5, and Vivienne, 2.

At the visitation, we quickly found a relative of the family, handed her the card for Esme and left within a few minutes of arriving. We talked in the car about how many people they had to take care of them and love them, and that we would keep praying for their family.

I have thought about those three children frequently.

I took my children to that visitation because I wanted them to know that people can survive the worst kind of tragedies. And that it's important to show respect and compassion for another person's tremendous loss.

But I also needed to be reassured. This mother's death shook me. I wanted to see all the love and support that would surround her babies.

When I became a parent, my life became so much more dear to me than it had ever been. Only I know the way I can love them. I know the way in which they need me.

The Windsor (Ont.) Star reported that the week before her death, Carolyn had called her sister-in-law almost in tears.

"I panicked because Carolyn never cried," Linda McFall said at the funeral, the paper reported. "I asked her what was wrong and she said 'No, nothing's wrong. I'm just standing at the window and I'm watching Suman play with the three kids in the backyard and I'm just so happy right now.'"

I know that feeling. That poignant joy that comes with seeing your children carefree and playing and loved.

This mother, whom I had never known in her life, revealed to me something essential and timeless after her death.

Love doesn't die.