I used to wonder why people tried so hard to be at the bedside at the moment when a loved one died. If they'd happened to go out of the hospital for a cup of tea, or even if they'd fallen asleep, they blamed themselves for missing the moment. As if it mattered. But now I begin to understand.
I got out of a plane in Sydney yesterday - I hardly knew what day it was, the journey from Ireland had been so long and surreal.
"Isn't it awful about the bomb," someone said.
" What bomb?"
And then I found a television and saw the Irish street and the wreckage. I heard the numbers. And, like Irish people the world over, I just wanted to be at home. The bottom had fallen out of our whole island project.
No one outside can understand how terrible the loss is. At least on the night of the Canary Wharf bomb I was with other people with tears in their eyes. Here, the only comment I've heard is: "We don't understand why you people over there hate each other so much."
I said to one person: "We don't hate each other. I assure you, on my solemn oath, that hardly anyone in Ireland hates anyone else."
But they believe what they see on their screens. It's no use explaining that the whole place, North and South, is full of decent people enjoying the summer who don't want anything except normality, the usual qualities of peace.
Evil is much more striking than good. The sheer breathtaking evil of the Omagh atrocity outweighs all the goodness of the year so far. It was, it really was, a year when you could see goodness working it's way with difficulty, but certainty, to the surface of Northern life.
In the referendums, in the self-questioning of unionism, in negotiation across the sectarian divide in Derry, in the persistence of David Trimble and Seamus Mallon in driving towards a workable Assembly.
All of these things transcended personal and historical limitations. But now the bombers have rebuilt the prison walls around us. Locked us in again, with nothing to contemplate but the depth of the hatred which made Irish people - as I am sure they will turn out to be - do this to Irish people.
It fills me with hate myself. I want to see them tortured, the human beings who could look upon their innocent fellow beings bustling about their happy Saturday tasks and then blast them to an awful death, without a minute to say goodbye.
Without anyone being able to call them back from going into town for the afternoon to just say to them quickly: "We love you. We think the world of you." No one had the chance. They wiped them out as if the human histories they embodied were of no account. There's no forgiveness for it.
If people are brought to court for this and are found guilty, I will be there to spit at them. I don't want to hear their explanation. If they use the words "Republican" or "united Ireland" or "Brits out", I want those words never to be used again.
This mass murder is a step too far. Even a lunatic can see that the only justification there ever was for an armed struggle, which was the structural entrenchment of anti-Catholic sectarianism in Northern Ireland, effectively ended this very year.
There is no politics left which murdering a baby is part of. There is nothing here but the dumb, blind chagrin of whatever so-called people feel slighted by peace.
At least we can say with confidence that there is no population behind this. There is no point in comforting ourselves with talk of internment. This isn't about Catholics or Protestants. This is about hatred so deformed by the last 30 years that it can take a heartbreakingly defenceless summer street of people and feel nothing for it.
Feel nothing for all that there is in every person - the way they were cooed at as babies and their first days of school and the little clothes they had and growing up and kissing other people and checking their money to see if they could afford this or that, and the worlds inside their heads. Each of them unique, irreplaceable.
Yet, if they were created, so were their murderers. Someone is walking around presumably proud that carnage has been efficiently perpetrated.
There we enter the realm of mystery. Not that we were ever far from it during all of the Anglo-Irish trouble. What passions drove so many people all along? Look at the unspeakable things which were done in the name of a new political settlement even though most people will make their lives meaningful anyway, even if the politics aren't right.
We've lived for a long time with the irrationality of unsatisfied nationalism, unionist nationalism as well as Irish. But the particular pain of the Omagh atrocity is that all that was over. North and South, the people had agreed to change. We were out of our straitjackets. We had the makings of decency between us.
But now, evil, it seems, rules.
The shameless and heartless win. There goes the confidence to put your teenager on a bus to a concert in Belfast, or to bring your aunt on a shopping trip to a Northern town. We cannot live in towns if we do not trust each other.
There can be no society while the evil ones are there, busily packing a car with explosives on a fine summer morning and checking that they have the price of a phone call to lure their sisters and brothers to suffering and death. The evil ones want us to be afraid all the time. That way we know how big they are.
It will take every bit of faith we have to go on hoping for peace now. We can't give these bombers what they want because they don't want anything there is to give. We may have to live with unreason. We may have to know that every smiling scene in Ireland is always suspect.
Maybe we'll have to pay harder for our history than we imagined. We thought to get out of it with ceasefires, referendums, diplomatic and political and bureaucratic initiatives.
But maybe we've been left with an untreatable psychosis. If you can look at a street full of humans, then detonate a bomb, psychosis is what politics has become.
Yet I went on, last night in Sydney, to say to strangers that things in Ireland had never been better in my lifetime. I say it now though - there has never, never been a blacker day.
This massacre isn't about Irish politics at all. It isn't about Ireland at all. Getting the explosives is a consequence of the Northern war, knowing how to kill a street full of people is also a consequence. But actually killing them for no reason? That's nothing to do with the hope there is for the island. Please God, there is a mathematics of evil in which so much has been used up in Omagh that there can be none left to stand between us and our real ordinary, grudging, down-to-earth future.
That pure evil is so destructive that it even destroys itself.