Family’s faith, grace in tragedy

The morning after his three children and their cousin were killed by an alleged intoxicated driver, Danny Abdallah spoke with a broken heart about little lives lost on a Sydney street. His simple, loving words for Antony, 13, Angelina, 12, Sienna, 9, and Veronique Sakr, 11, struck a chord with a nation stunned by the tragedy. Mr Abdallah said he was numb, yet in his calm, tender way transcended the sorrow by speaking of the joy the children brought to their parents. He urged drivers to be careful, to watch out for innocent kids like his own, walking to the shops to buy ice cream on a stiflingly hot night.

As the site of the accident became a floral shrine of remembrance, Mr Abdallah’s wife, Leila, said she was not going to hate the man behind the wheel but forgive him. It was a rare act of grace in a chaotic world that too often knows violence, retribution and hatred. “I am sad. I am heartbroken. But I am at peace because I know my kids are in a better place,” she said. Pain, suffering and loss are inescapable; there’s the rub of life. Yet the Abdallahs are being sustained by their Maronite Catholic faith. Life cannot be the same for them but, as Kevin Donnelly wrote on Tuesday, “while the loss and pain will never be erased, in prayer and communal grieving there is solace”. May the families come to know this shocking loss is shared deeply and widely, and that as a nation we mourn the four children taken from them.