There is a sound a door makes when a knob turns or a hinge creaks or when it shuts behind you.

If you are 8 years old, it makes no sense when that noise means a man is entering your bedroom late at night.

It's even less comprehensible when it's your father.

Dixie Gillaspie was aware of that sound for six years of her childhood. She grew up in a small town in southeast Kansas. Her parents belonged to a secretive, evangelical Christian community that met in people's homes. Her upbringing was very conservative and strict, with harsh physical punishment, but it also had an idyllic veneer.

"It's like you're watching all these fairy tales and someone slips a horror story in the middle of it," she said. "I assumed that as long as I didn't talk about the horror movies, I could go back to the fairy tales, and that's what kept me safe."

Gillaspie, a popular speaker, business coach and author in St. Louis, had never spoken publicly about this part of her childhood until Maya Angelou died recently. The poet and author had also been raped as a young child a few miles from where Gillaspie, 50, now lives.

Gillaspie, whose father died decades ago, wrote a blog post for The Good Men Project the day after Angelou's death (goodmenproject.com/featured-content/song-maya-angelou-taught-us-choice-dg/). In it, she says: "It's here in that same city that I sit with my silence. And feel her strong north wind of a voice. And know that strings are moving, and I can be silent no longer."

She refuses to be seen as a victim, although she says she had been physically and sexually abused by her father for years. She knows about black eyes, bruises on her body, blisters on her legs, welts on her back and visits at night. For years, she blocked out the worst of those memories, struggled with depression and survived a couple suicide attempts.

In her early 20s, her father was dying of cancer. She went back home with her then-boyfriend and future husband, Tom Gillaspie, and nursed him in his final months. She decided to put what had happened to her before in a separate box of a previous life.

"I could have a family and pretend it didn't happen. Or I could hold on to my story, and not have a family. It wasn't a matter of forgiveness; I wanted a family," she said. "It's how I survived. It's not going to be everyone's choice."

Most days during that time, she and Tom didn't leave her parents' home. They slept on a makeshift pallet on the laundry room floor, and she was up several times a night to care for her father.

One day, they went to visit Tom's family a couple of hours away. They stayed later than they intended. When she rushed in to check on her father, he started with, "Where have you been? You said you'd be back to help ..."

Suddenly, he stopped and said, "I'm sorry."

She went through the motions of turning him in the bed, and says she must have given him his medicine and food, though she doesn't remember those details. All she could hear was, "I'm sorry."

It was the first time she could remember hearing those words from her father.

She sat on the back step of the house and bawled.

She was 23 when he died.

In her late 20s, the memories of abuse became an avalanche that refused to be ignored. She has been in therapy, written a fictionalized book of her story and confided in a few close friends over the years. She had to confront it internally and admit to herself the extent of the abuse. She had to believe that she did not deserve it, that she didn't ask for it. Eventually, Dixie began asking herself: What do I have to do in order for my story to do any good?

She wanted to share her story without any desire for pity or anger on her behalf. She has stopped keeping track of who knew and didn't know about her past. She says that forgiveness is for your own sake, and that compassion doesn't mean you don't condemn what was wrong or punish what needs to be punished.

She needed to realize it was OK to let go of bitterness, anger and hate.

The months she cared for the man who she says attacked her repeatedly for years brought its own healing to her.

"I had those months to get to know the man my father wanted to be. And I still miss that man."

He despised women as badly as he wanted them.

Elliot Rodger's rants blamed women for rejecting him. His manifesto declared a desire to kill as many as possible. He was a part of Men's Rights Activist communities, spaces supportive of men who feel oppressed when denied sex by women they want. Last week, Rodger killed six people and injured 13 in Isla Vista, California, near UC Santa Barbara, before killing himself.

The tragically routine conversations surfaced soon after the attack: the pleas for sensible gun control and better mental illness treatment. Some questioned whether the sheriff's deputies, having been alerted to Rodger's dark YouTube videos by his family members before the attack, would have been as quick to determine he was a "nice kid" if he had been a different race or religion.

But an unexpected response also took root on Twitter. The hashtag #YesAllWomen began in answer to the defensive response that "not all men" are violent. (For God's sake, we know this.) The #YesAllWomen hashtag been used more than a million times since the killings to describe the small and large ways in which everyday misogyny infects women's lives: the negotiations and mental calculations we take for granted.

The same day this hashtag began, I had scolded my daughter for walking one flight in a hotel stairwell without me. That's a place where people can be sexually assaulted, I told her. Never walk in a stairwell alone.

She's 11.

I'll continue to teach her these kinds of survival skills throughout her life: Always call and wait for campus security when walking home at night in college. Never leave a drink unattended. Hold your keys between your knuckles when walking to your car at night. Check the backseat before getting into a vehicle after dark. Be careful about getting in a car, an elevator, any enclosed space alone with a man.

I have internalized these habits and do them instinctively.

Rape, harassment and sexual abuse of girls and women are so common that it is a default position to teach our daughters: Be aware. Be cautious. Be vigilant.

But all the personal vigilance in the world is not enough to protect ourselves. The female victims of male violence cross every category we create -- age, ethnicity, social class.

As parents of a son as well, my husband and I will continue to teach him what it means to treat women with dignity and respect in every interaction. I will make an effort to point out to him the elements of culture that objectify half of humanity.

Who knows how the connection between culture and violence precisely works? We do know, however, that it is men who commit more than 90 percent of murders in this world, according to the World Homicide Survey. Rapists, by and large, are men. The onus of addressing that rests upon all of us.

It doesn't typically occur to us to speak out about the ordinary, ambient violence we witness or experience on a regular basis.

Who are these men who feel entitled to harass a woman as she walks down a street?

Who are these men who put their uninvited hands on a woman's body in a club?

Who are these men who email rape threats to women who write opinions with which they disagree?

Of course, it's not all men. But, as author and blogger Chuck Wendig wrote in response, it's still too many men.

Four men and two women were slain by a 22-year-old man possessed by a demented ideology. His horrific, sick actions and vile words have not gone unchallenged. The women who have publicly borne witness to what must change are engaged in an act of courage.

Yes, all women can share a story in which they feared anger, hatred or violence from a man, whether by an individual or simply by the threat that hangs in the air of an empty parking lot.

Yes, all men should hear it.

It should be easier to know the price of something so costly.

But in a war, numbers are contentious -- politicized and hard to pin down.

We live in a country that has been engaged in long-term, recent wars. The day-to-day reality of that impacts a sliver of people who have served or are serving overseas and their families. Do the rest of us have any idea how much it has cost us in blood and treasure?

There have been 6,805 American servicemen and women who have died during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Faces of the Fallen tracker by the Washington Post.

The death toll among Iraqis and Afghanis is much harder to know.

There have been at least 120,000, and maybe more than 137,000, Iraqi civilians killed by violence during the war, according to British-based Iraq Body Count. Including enemy combatants brings the death toll to 188,000.

The most recent peer-reviewed and comprehensive study, however, places the total Iraqi death toll much higher -- at 500,000, of which 60 percent were violent deaths and 40 percent were war-related, avoidable, indirect deaths, such as patients who died for lack of treatment in hospitals overwhelmed with war casualities.

In Afghanistan, there have been between 18,000 and 20,000 civilian deaths attributed to the war.

Our country's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost taxpayers more than $4 trillion and could reach up to $6 trillion in the long run, according to a Harvard study published last year.

These numbers are staggering and outside what we can truly comprehend.

Still, we have a responsibility as citizens, not only of this country but of the world, to consider these costs and ask ourselves if the outcomes have been worth the price.

When I force myself to confront this question, I lose track of numbers. I go back to 2006, the year I returned to work after the birth of my son.

I covered four local military deaths that year.

I remember the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Jonathan Kyle Price, from a small town in southern Illinois, talking about how he was supposed to return in a month and marry his pregnant fiancee. He was killed in Iraq that January. He was 19.

My younger brother was 19 that year, too.

Two months later, I covered the funeral of Army Sgt. Amanda Nicole Pinson. I remember the Toby Keith song "American Solider" played during her service, and the older veteran who stood with his hand over his heart as the cars in her funeral procession headed to the cemetery. She was 21.

That summer, I witnessed the funeral and burial of Marine Cpl. Riley Baker. There were a thousand mourners at his service and a seven-mile funeral procession. He was 22.

I watched a mother's face when she was handed an American flag folded into a triangle and the way she clutched it to her chest.

Right before Christmas, I wrote about Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew W. Clark. He had thought about his mother when he filled out his emergency contact form before leaving for Iraq. He wrote that he wanted his priest present if his mother had to hear bad news, so his priest accompanied three Marines when they visited her. Clark was 22.

These four would have been young when the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11. They came of age in a time when our country had been attacked, and they wanted to do what they could to defend it.

As a young new mother, I sobbed through each service and burial I attended that year. I thought about their lives and the broken hearts of their families.

Our pain is like the pain of any other parent in the world.

There's the other cost of war.

The cost that has nothing to do with numbers.