Both O’Reilly’s criticism and the reverse—reactions that admire how quickly the students resorted to activism—rely on a sense that grief and political activism are not natural partners. These responses seem to imply that the Parkland students’ fervor is either so soon that it’s brave, or too soon and therefore unreliable. The students’ quick turn to action is neither uncommon in American history nor detrimental to the process of grief. But they are still grieving, and that grief could hit even harder as the buzz of interviews and rallies dies down and they settle back into their lives at school.

While the Parkland movement is for many reasons unique in the history of activism, the immediacy of the students’ action isn’t one of them. Angus Johnston, a City University of New York professor who studies the history of student activism, pointed out that American civil-rights activists would often turn to political organizing right after a lynching took place. The mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, insisted on a public funeral; Till’s mother urged the public to look at his disfigured body, and the photographs and news coverage quickly spurred a national conversation on racism. Recent responses to police shootings of black men have also speedily taken on a political tone, Johnston said. The Parkland students are joining a long tradition of American mourners who channel their grief into political activism.

The Parkland students have been moving from candlelight vigils and friends’ funerals to CNN interviews and strategy sessions in each other’s living rooms. Sometimes grief and politics overlapped in the same moment, like when a chant of “no more guns!” broke out at a candlelight vigil the day after the shooting. Reading about the teens’ hectic and exhausting days, it’s hard not to worry: Can this really be healthy? Experts say it can, though they stress there are caveats.

The reasons for turning to political action in moments of grief are fairly intuitive: Humans naturally look to find some meaning in a painful and senseless event. It’s a way of continuing a story that has reached a sudden end, said Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist at Duke University Medical Center who specializes in children’s trauma. Gurwitch suggested that the question of whether it’s “too soon” to undertake activist work glosses over the nuances of grief. “Whenever that individual feels like, ‘I need to do something’ ... [this action] can be very helpful to the healing process,” she said. And it doesn’t have to be an either-or choice: “It is not as simple as a binary [of] ‘I can either be an advocate or ... be grieving,’” Gurwitch said.

After a traumatic event, a person has no choice but to move forward—where she might have a choice is in where she will move. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek krisis, which means ‘fork in the road’ or ‘decision,’ noted Stephen Brock, a professor of psychology at California State University, Sacramento, who has worked on issues of student trauma and grief. “When something like this happens, you can’t continue along your same path. You have to choose a new path.” And a person has lots of roads—healthy or dangerous or something in between—to choose from.