So many of us are thinking the same few sad thoughts. They may come with vivid images or without, depending on what you’ve seen and what you’ve known. They may toll through your being with peals of sympathy or only skitter over the surface. But so many of us can’t help thinking that the recent killings in Newtown, Connecticut, were especially tragic.

Why is this?

I can only speak from my own experience; I won’t presume to say what might happen in the depths of your being. But perhaps our experiences overlap, and we can learn something from each other.

I know that every moment I spend with my children, who are very close in age to those who were slaughtered, I am thinking about their future. What is more joyful to a parent than seeing their child master a new skill? In my experience, the excitement is not about the thing itself—say, learning to crawl—but about what that will lead to—cruising, walking, running… graduation. So, the joy of parenting, even in the moment, relies upon the child reaching a future, even if it’s not the exact future you’d envisioned.

I imagine that when a child is killed, those who loved the child experience a pain that’s as deep as any pain can be; it’s not a branch that’s snipped off but a plant that’s torn up by its roots, ripping back into the past, undoing the meaning of their lives.

That is a part of why this is so wounding.

We put a burden of hopes on our children. I know I do. I can believe in a decent world when they smile. When they hurt, when they are at risk, and when they are taken away, I fear that horror will never be subdued. An event like this can make us lose hope and cower like hostages to the bestiality in our own natures.

There is much more we could say. We could talk about gun control. We could compare this loss to the scale of daily global carnage and question why we care more about some killings than about others. But no matter how much we say, we won’t be able to comprehend this event and set it in a story that logically resolves hope and horror. We feel the best we can do right now is make these small observations.