Every parent in Ireland today will be dwelling on the immeasurable, unfathomable pain of Mark and Majella Holohan for whom the worst possible news is believed to have become reality yesterday afternoon.
Emma Holohan, who is just eight years old, and Harry who is four, should not have to try to make sense out of what seems to have happened to their elder brother, the fresh-faced 11-year-old whose photograph has been in every newspaper, and on every TV screen, since he disappeared on January 4th.
Sudden bereavement comes to many families but is often the result of an accident or the sheer bad luck of drawing a short straw in health. The shock for the bereaved is great to be sure; but how much greater the shock, how much deeper the pain, when the cause appears to be the evildoing of one person against another - and how more shocking and painful when the victim is a child, a young boy for whom the future held infinite possibility?
We do not, at this juncture, know precisely what happened to Robert Holohan or why. The Garda inquiries in Cork have taken on a wholly different character following the discovery of a body yesterday. Gardaí are seeking to identify the dead person and to determine the cause of death, the place where death occurred and how the body came to be where it was.
It is for the gardaí to gather such facts as may be had; it will be for others, if such an opportunity arises, to apportion blame.
And as all this continues, the Holohan family will have to carry on, clinging to each other and such faith as they may have to see them through. Terrible events can sometimes bring out the best in people. The Holohans will have seen that for themselves recently. Day after day, hundreds upon hundreds of people - on occasions more than 1,000 - came to Midleton, sometimes from as far as Mayo and Dublin, to assist the gardaí and Army in their search. In dreadful weather and with nothing to gain for themselves, save the reflected enrichment of a burden shared, they sought to help a family in crisis and which many of them did not even know.
That may be of small, but hopefully not insignificant, comfort to the Holohan family. It should warm the rest of us to know that in our society, despite the sometimes corrosive effects of increased material prosperity and diminished spirituality, so many people still come forward as a community to help others in their hours of crisis.
Thankfully, events such as this remain rare in Ireland and feeling deeply upset for the family drawn into such a tragedy should not prompt the rest of us to make hasty changes in lifestyle.
Children are, for the most part, safe in rural as well as urban areas. Overbearing shielding from an imperfect world will not produce in the future adults any more capable of coping with inexplicable horrors than we are now.