Unimaginable horror. The scenes of devastation from Turkey and Syria. People have lost everything. 

Parents digging their children out of the rubble. Husbands searching for their wives. Wives for their husbands.

I struggle to get my head around it. The prospect of losing your child in any circumstances is one that I, as a parent, find too awful to contemplate. 

All that love, hope, promise, potential – lost in an instant. How do people live with that burden?

On Monday, I listened to an interview with children’s author Michael Rosen. He was talking about his new book Getting Better. 

Not only is Michael coping with severe impairment following his near death in the early days of COVID, but also the loss of his teenage son, Eddie, who went to bed one night with flu-like symptoms and never woke up again. 

Michael found him cold the next morning.  ‘How do you get better from something as total and devastating as this?’ he asks.  He goes on to answer that in his inspirational book.

Some friends had a similar experience.  Every day they would breakfast with their young adult son who lived with them and then wave him goodbye as he drove off to work. 

But one day, shortly after he left, there was a knock at the door. The police called to tell them their son had just been killed in a freak road accident. 

They have never recovered. I’m not sure I would either.

Charlie Waller was a popular, likeable and seemingly happy young man who tragically took his own life at the age of 28. 

In response to their loss, his parents founded a charity, the Charlie Waller Trust, to raise awareness of how depression affects young people. 

It has benefited tens of thousands, improving understanding of mental health and well-being by giving the people around youngsters the knowledge and skills to support them and successfully raising the profile of mental well-being, long before it became fashionable. 

The loss fired them into doing all they could to prevent it from happening to others.

I’m lucky. My life has been barely tinged by tragedy. I’ve had my share of disappointments, the ‘ups and downs’ of everyday life. 

Like others, I’ve lost loved ones in the natural course of events or to unexpected and consequential illnesses.

But nothing that has brought my life to a screaming, shuddering halt in the way that we have seen in the course of the last week. 

Hearing how people, like Michael Rosen or Charlie Waller’s parents, make sense of the tragedy is humbling. 

My heart truly goes out to those who have lost everything they hold dear. 

I am reminded how fragile is our hold on the things that truly matter to us most and how blessed we are to have them.