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.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about a conversation I had with a reader shortly after the election in November.

I had written a column about how half the country was trying to explain the election results to our children, especially those who heard the winning candidate slur their ethnic or religious group. My children, like millions of other people in this country, struggled to understand how a man who had denigrated so many people and groups had gotten elected to the highest office in the land.

I wrote that it was “OK to tell them there are still millions of sexist and racist people ... We have to be able to acknowledge and recognize the depth of our country’s racism and sexism.”

Those weren’t the only factors involved in how people voted, of course, but they played a role. I expected pushback from readers who disagreed, and some of them sent hate mail, insults and threats. But one gentleman called to have a more personal conversation. He said that he had been reading my column for years, and even though we sometimes disagreed politically, he imagined we would get along well in real life. In fact, we would probably be friends. (That’s probably true.)

That’s why he said he felt personally hurt by the column I had written, in which I seemed to say that people who voted for Trump were racist or sexist. That was not my implication, I said. As an American Muslim, I am particularly sensitive to being unfairly maligned by stereotypes and assumptions. Like you, I’m insulted by the insinuation that I have anything in common with hate-filled terrorists or extremists.

He said he didn’t care for Trump’s rhetoric, nor did he think Trump really meant all of what he said, but that he wanted to vote for someone who was not a typical politician and could bring economic progress.

I understood that. In my desire to tend to his hurt feelings and also to get back to my work, I chose not to say something I now wish I had. I wish I’d said that I could never have voted for a person who made the sorts of remarks we heard from Trump -- even if I thought “he didn’t really mean it.” There were many people in the past election who were not racist, but who were willing to overlook ugly and hateful rhetoric because it didn’t affect them personally or because they didn’t take it seriously.

You know who didn’t overlook that rhetoric? Straight-up hate groups. They heard it loud and clear and took it as a call to arms, which many of us who he demonized feared would happen. We saw it on horrific display when hundreds of torch-bearing neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, and a counter-protester was killed crossing the street by a man plowing his car through the crowd.

In Trump’s latest remarks about the racist rally and violence in Virginia, the president went back to his original statement -- blaming “many sides,” and stating that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Confederate-statue protests. The fact is, only one side has been marching with Nazi paraphernalia.

In response to Trump’s comments, former KKK leader David Duke tweeted, “Thank you to President Trump for your honesty and courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville ...” He said the rally there was to “fulfill the promise of Donald Trump.”

I’ve been thinking about what I would say to that same caller today:

I’m sorry, sir, that your feelings were hurt by my stating the fact that this recent election has energized, emboldened and empowered bigots and racists.

But I am far sorrier about the murders of Heather Heyer in Virginia, of Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche in Portland, of Richard Collins III in Maryland and Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas -- killed by those spewing hatred.

I have read the surging reports of mosques being vandalized at the rate of two per week, the reports of swastikas in schools and racist taunts used by bullies. The fact that our president cannot distinguish between racist violence and those protesting Nazis should make us sick.

But I take heart in how our conversation ended. You told me that you were going to wait and see how the newly elected president acted in office. So, how has he done? He has cut funding for groups that fight white supremacists, killing the Countering Violent Extremism funds for those groups that work to stop violent extremism and recruitment efforts for far-right groups. You heard him in his own words in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy.

You and I live in the Show-Me State.

Have you seen enough yet?