When Angela Hoepfner found her teenage son in the kitchen on Dec. 2, two years ago, she thought she had walked into a crime scene. She called 911 and ran outside the house.

Her memory from that day is fuzzy in places, but she must have also called her mother and sisters. Family members started showing up at her home.

The police told her it wasn’t a homicide, and it wasn’t an accident.

Scott, her 16-year-old son, couldn’t be saved.

Angela sat in her car in shock for hours until the funeral home came to pick up Scott’s body.

“My world blew up in one day,” she said. “My everything was gone.”

Scott played varsity football as a high-school junior. He was a happy-go-lucky kid who sang in the shower and talked about joining the Army to work with military dogs after graduating. He adored his own dogs -- Micah, Mojo and Mastiff -- who followed him around the house and slept with him at night. He volunteered at the local dog shelter and with Sweet Celebrations, a nonprofit that hosts birthday parties for homeless children.

He earned Eagle Scout at 14, and loved to crack jokes.

“He made it hard to parent sometimes, because he was so funny,” Angela said. A single mother since he was born, her world revolved around her son. His artwork hung all over the walls of their house.

They had both watched the popular Netflix series “13 Reasons Why,” a teen drama about a girl who takes her own life. They talked about it briefly afterward.

“That’s stupid,” he said. “I don’t know why anybody would do that.”

Less than six months later, he was gone.

Angela has racked her brain for a single clue, but nothing comes up.

What did she miss?

“I beat myself up every day of what I could have done differently,” she said.

But her son was talking about their Christmas plans for later that month. He was popular. He wasn’t bullied. In fact, he was the kind of kid who would stand up for someone else getting teased.

More than 1,000 people showed up for his funeral. They shared her shock.

“If Scott can’t make it in this world, I don’t know how I can,” one of his friends said to her. The words cut through her like a knife.

No other parents should have to endure this hell, she thought.

Why hadn’t Scott’s school warned parents that the youth suicide rate is at an all-time high? Why didn’t anyone tell her about the sharp rise in suicide among teenage boys?

She worries about his friends and other vulnerable kids. She tried to get the school to talk about Scott, but they refused, saying they didn’t want to glorify the way he died.

Angela talks about him whenever she can. She tells parents to talk with their kids, even the ones who seem OK, about suicide. After all, her son was the strong one, the one with so many plans and adventures ahead.

“I talked about suicide with my son once, and that was it, because I thought he was happy and everything was fine,” she said.

Angela made a pact with her sister to go somewhere beautiful and see something magical every Dec. 2. This year, they picked Fiji. Before she left, Angela asked close friend Tonya Ehlert to do something in Scott’s memory while she was gone. Ehlert came up with the idea of passing out cards with Scott’s photo that ask the recipients to do a random act of kindness. She wanted to attach a peanut butter cup -- Scott’s favorite -- to each card.

Angela took it a step further. She raised enough money to give away 150 Caniac Combos -- Scott’s favorite meal -- at fried-chicken chain Raising Cane’s. After the restaurant’s manager heard the plan, he donated an extra 50 meals.

A local print shop donated 300 cards, and the project was a Go. On Dec. 2, about 15 family friends showed up at the restaurant to hand out cards, peanut butter cups and free meals.

In Fiji, Angela read texts from Scott’s friends about the acts of kindness they were doing in his memory. She wonders if the people who got the cards will pass them forward, and how far his memory will ripple.

Secretly, she fears that her son could be forgotten.

Scott would leave a trail when he got home; Angela would trip over his shoes or backpack on the ground. She says it still feels like he’s away at camp and might walk in the door any moment.

Angela moved to a new house the day after Scott died. Whenever the school bus passed by their new house, the pups would run to the window and look for Scott. They did that every day for more than a year, she says.

It’s taken her nearly two years to find a purpose in her grief. She started a foundation in Scott’s name to promote small acts of kindness: buying someone a meal, holding a door open, reaching out to someone who is struggling.

She thinks about what Scott’s legacy will be.

“It’s time to channel my grief into spreading some love,” she said, “because Scott would want me to.”

The holidays can bring families together in ways that provoke unwanted drama. So, it can be helpful to structure some of that free time. The controlled chaos of family game night can provide a reprieve from boredom, chores and bickering.

We have an annual family tradition of testing a crop of new board games with our children in an extended family game night. And since our children have reached ages where spending time with family is far more enjoyable when their friends are also involved, this year, we invited our 17-year-old daughter’s friends to join us. Our 14-year-old son agreed to referee.

First, we attempted a board game inspired by internet searches. Autocomplete is designed for three to 10 players, ages 18 and up, although it seemed fine for younger teens, as well. The concept is simple: Two teams have one minute to guess the top 10 internet searches for a given prompt, read from a card. A judge keeps score while everyone yells out their guesses as fast as possible.

Feeling a little overconfident, my husband and I challenged our daughter and her two friends, while our son took on the role of judge. Once the card was read and the timer started, we started yelling out whatever came into our heads. The guesses were, at times, bizarre and nonsensical. Our son said it was often difficult to determine who gave an answer first, or which ones were being repeated. In a close call, Gen Z barely edged out Gen X for the win.

For the next challenge, we took on a social deduction game called The Chameleon. The game is designed for three to eight players, ages 14 and older.

In each round of play, a secret word is selected from a topic card. Everyone gets a code to figure out what the word is, except for the player who gets a chameleon card. When the round starts, every player has to quickly call out a word related to the secret word. The chameleon must bluff through this round. Once everyone has said a word, the players vote on who they think the chameleon is.

Everyone agreed that the accusation and guessing parts were the most enjoyable aspects of this game, but that the overall game was overly complicated.

We also had trouble figuring out the scoring mechanism, and what fun is a game if you can’t gloat about winning?

Our testers were just getting warmed up by this point, while the Olds were starting to lose steam. Fortunately, we were ready to test our final game, Blockbuster Party Game, which is designed for four or more players, ages 12 and up.

In this setup, teams compete to guess movie titles based on clues given in different ways, from one-word hints to charades. We split into two teams, and my husband and I claimed one of the teenage movie buffs for our team. This was a smart move. Otherwise, we would have been shut out.

In the first round, each team chose a person to go head-to-head in a quick-fire buzzer battle. Given categories like “Famous trilogies” and “Movies with a zombie in it,” these two players shouted out movie titles and slapped a buzzer. The first player to run out of ideas lost the round.

The winner from the face-off then picked three movie title cards. The player had to get their teammates to guess the title within 30 seconds using one of three techniques: acting out the plot, using a quote from the movie, or describing it in one word. The team that collects a film from every genre wins.

Those with extensive movie knowledge have a huge advantage. Our early recruitment strategy -- and collective years of movie-watching -- paid off, and the Olds, plus a movie-savvy teen, bested the Youths.

As we’ve learned over the years, there is an ideal moment to conclude game night: as soon as you can declare victory.

A Twitter user fired off a string of vulgar and bigoted tweets at 2:23 a.m.

I was tagged in one -- it was the kind of racist, expletive-ridden rant that’s a dime a dozen on social media. It was another post that caught my eye.

“We’ll get rid of her.” That’s how this poster responded to a congratulatory tweet about my sister’s election in Texas.

My sister is a sitting U.S. judge.

I reported the tweets and threat to Twitter and sent screenshots to my sister, who passed them along to law enforcement.

This came on the heels of reports that a Republican candidate in St. Petersburg, Florida, recently sent a fundraising email saying U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, should be hanged. Omar’s Republican challenger in Minnesota was permanently suspended from Twitter for also suggesting the congresswoman should be tried for treason and hanged. Last month, Omar asked for leniency in the sentencing of a New York man who pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for threatening to kill her.

Omar, like my family, is Muslim.

Outrage is too familiar a feeling on social media -- that flash of anger and disgust at the latest moral transgression, blatant lie or hypocrisy. Some exist in a constant state of outrage, while others profit from its peak production. The line between expressing moral outrage and threatening violence against political opponents, however, is getting blurrier in the digital age.

Yale psychology professor Molly Crockett has researched how expressions of moral outrage have changed over time. Expressing outrage is one way societies enforce social norms: by punishing and shaming those who violate those norms, she explained in a recent lecture. But the context of how this plays out online has rapidly evolved from earlier times.

Many adults and children may not realize that social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, are not neutral platforms. Their algorithms favor posts designed to provoke outrage -- regardless of whether the shared information is true. The truth is cast aside to maximize the number of users and the amount of time they spend on the site. If it’s likely to provoke you, you’re more likely to see it.

We are more frequently exposed to posts that support our own biases and worldviews and that are designed to trigger moral outrage. We’ve also learned that innumerable posts are deliberately created by bad actors who have a vested interest in spreading misinformation.

Crockett notes that the barriers to expressing outrage have greatly diminished online. It takes a few clicks on a keyboard behind the cloak of anonymity to attack another person. Psychologically, the user is rewarded by validation through likes or interaction, which can reinforce a habitual loop. Brain imaging and psychological studies show there’s something immediately satisfying about expressing outrage, Crockett said. This may help explain why some trolls linger on sites and feel compelled to post repeated negative comments expressing the same sentiments over and over.

In some cases, online moral outrage can be a force for positive social change. A recent example is Amazon’s decision to remove offensive Auschwitz-themed ornaments from its site after public backlash. But there’s also a significant corrosive and toxic element to it, and a numbing effect.

When the internet is always humming in the background, injecting little jots of outrage throughout the day, every day, it changes our society -- and it changes us.

When everything provokes outrage, it doesn’t work to prevent bad behavior anymore. Offenders are no longer shamed. And, nowadays, when you share outrage, you’re largely preaching to the choir, since so many users filter their information sources based on what they already believe.

It’s a dilemma for those of us who rely on digital platforms to stay informed and connected. We don’t want to become numb to corruption, bigotry and injustice. The expression of moral outrage feels satisfying because it is also an indicator of what you care about, what your values and priorities are and a way to signal that to others. Yet, the consequences for being steeped in moral outrage on a regular basis are unclear. Could these feedback loops and biochemical rewards to outrage expression rewire the brain?

Threats of violence against political opponents is a sign that something’s seriously gone wrong.