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As a parent, it's my responsibility to equip my child to do this - to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don't know what happens after death.

Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him.

I don't like my parents; I never will. I didn't cry at either of their funerals. I haven't missed them for five seconds. I didn't - you know, our characters were so at odds with one another right from the beginning. But I do understand them now as human beings, with the understanding of an adult.

Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.

When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.

If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

When I had to bury my child, I probably didn't start grieving until a year and a half later.

I suppose and I hope that the young guys who are out there losing their lives at least feel the same way I did. I shouldn't think about this very much because I'm almost weeping when I think about it.

Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!