Roy Curtis: The sudden death of a child brings with it an agonising heartache

The loss of a child opens an incurable wound, triggers the kind of pain that is unyielding, invincible, forever.

Reading about the tragic teenage deaths of school friends Max Wall and Andrew O’Donnell on the Greek island of Ios, one distressing image kept flashing across the mind’s eye.

The moment – unimaginable in its awfulness – that the news was broken to their respective parents.

A knock on the door, the ringing of a phone. And everything changes. Everything. Life dissolves into a landscape of ruin.

Recently, we attended the funeral of a son of friends.

The crochet of anguish embroidered into the features of his devastated parents was a dagger to every gathered heart. It was as if every last drop had been ladled from the well of heartache and emptied before us.

The service was beautiful, the words touching, the music perfectly pitched. But the pain spoke loudest.

Amongst those gathered to support the family, the overpowering sense was one of helplessness, impotence.

Because nothing, no gesture, no word, no matter how heartfelt or well intentioned, was, at that moment, going to dilute the unimaginable, crucifying suffering.

All you can do is offer yourself as a crutch. And hope against hope that it might make the tiniest difference.

Once heard, a mother’s haunting howl of torment as her boy’s coffin is taken from the hearse, a visceral lament for a child she brought into the world, cannot ever be unheard.

A lid will not be held down on that level of pain.

As adults ourselves, we bury parents and, yes, their absence opens a giant chasm in our world.

We miss them, intensely. We visit their graveside in search of the love they once washed over us in enormous daily waves.

Yet, even as we navigate through the fog of bereavement, we understand that this is the natural order of things and are enormously consoled by memories of a full life well lived.

In these instances, a funeral can be a cathartic experience, a celebration.

But the sudden, unexpected death of a teenager annihilates all sense of perspective.

All that stolen promise, the relationships never forged, the adventures stillborn, the words left unspoken, a book closed with terrible finality just as the story begins.

Those that breathe on can only stumble across the shards of a broken world.

And yet there is a marvellous resilience to the human spirit.

Somehow, people find ways to reattach arteries of hope that, in the wake of tragedy, appear irredeemably severed.

Frequently, the bereaved find solace in pouring all that distressed energy into helping others, establishing foundations or endowments in the name of their fallen son or daughter.

My own father kept alive in his own mind a brother who died in his twenties and to whom he was exceptionally close by pouring his energies into a basketball tournament that bore his name.

I remember Dad telling me: “I feel him with me at every committee meeting and every game.”

Acquaintances who have lost children speak about how, in time, the power of community and the support of friends becomes a parachute on which they can tug when they feel they are falling.

One bereaved mother told me how she draws the strength from an abundance of letters, many from strangers, that popped through her letterbox in the days and weeks after her son’s passing.

She reads and re-reads the words. The kindness spilling from the pages acts as a kind of emotional fuel, a reminder she is not alone.

Those thoughtful sentences composed by others are her medicine.

It doesn’t heal the wound, nothing can. But it is a balm to the sting.

A heartfelt paragraph can find her core and momentarily part the clouds, offering a glimpse of the old sunlight.

Over the next 72 hours, the funerals of Max and Andrew will be a harrowing ordeal for their families and for the classmates who were with them on that coming-of-age Greek odyssey.

As always at times like this, many of us are consumed by one overwhelming urge.

It is to hold tight to those we love and be thankful for every day our fragile world spins on something like its proper axis.