When tragedy strikes the world slips off its axis. But there are moments of solace

Most of the time you go about your daily life, travel through the streets of habit and knowability without a thought. You’ve walked this path so many times, you know the contours of the buildings, the inner and outer landscapes of the day and night, know the habit of humdrum and the comfort created from it. There’s a safety in feeling this routine.

Most people aren’t adventurers; they see in their journeys a reassurance from knowing what is around the bend. Like the embrace of family and friends, like knowing that flowing through your life, if you are lucky, is love, especially of family, especially of a parent to a child, of a father and a mother to a son or daughter.

Jack Davey, 11, was killed when a car careered into his schoolyard.

When that is ripped away from you, when a life stops, a life you had seen since its moment of creation an emptiness opens up that had been unknowable. I can’t, and wouldn’t, presume to know the life of the Davey family and what they are feeling from the taking away from them of their Jack. Each family’s grief at the loss of one of their own is private. The world cannot touch it, it can only be a bystander to it.

This is not to say the sympathy, compassion, and kindness of strangers to the devastation wrought from the incident at Jack’s school a few days ago is not real. It has been overwhelming. As Jack’s father Michael spoke to the world: “Words can’t adequately describe the utter devastation we feel as we come to terms with the sudden, overwhelming loss of our Jack, a son, brother and friend to many. We find comfort in reading the many messages and memories of Jack and how his life and energy was a positive influence on so many in the community at just 11 years old. Personally, he is our champion.”

Indeed, all the attention can be a great solace. I know. I lost my son five years ago, almost to the week. He lived a decade more than Jack. Hamish was 21 when he died. The kindness of others to myself, my wife Pip and daughter Grace was overwhelming.

It’s the harshest lesson of life that death, which will visit all of us, can do so with such random causality. A tree branch crushes a driver, a plane falls from the sky onto your house. A car enters where it should never enter. And the world slips off its axis, and the universe is realigned; something happens internally when someone you love more than the whole world is no longer in it, your heart aches, physically aches, the soul comes to the surface in ways you did not think possible. Why would you know such things, after all? This is the journey of desolation no one should have to take.

In the aftermath the blood that runs through your body now carries a grief so raw it scrapes the flesh, it numbs you, and yet, and yet there are things to be done. A funeral must be arranged. You think, how can it be that a father is burying his son? How is that fair? How is it fair to collect the ashes of your son from the funeral home, hold them close to you to the car, and place them in the passenger seat, and buckle them in with the seat belt? You’re taking him home, and yet you’re not. It is the most brutal way of coming to realise the things that matter and the things that don’t. And in the place of the young life death places grief. For a very long time it is hard to even countenance that grief and love are part of the whole. But to me, at least, that is what has surfaced and buoyed me along the currents of days and nights. This, and the kindness of others.

Life is precious and beautiful, and it is cruel. Few people have the time for philosophical contemplation, to muse upon the meaning of it all. And perhaps there is no meaning to the universe. But this. It is a blessing to have known love, especially from a parent to a child, and to feel that love back. The words, the touch, the laughter, the smile. Perhaps, that’s all you need. In the emptiness, there is that consolation.

Warwick McFadyen is a desk editor at The Age.

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