Bad news gets harder to stomach

Maybe it's just me, I suspect not though: my ability to watch stories like those coming out of Samoa and Sumatra has deteriorated since having kids. In fact even since genuinely falling in love, something I now know I've only done once.

When you care about someone, or ones, so much that life itself becomes unimaginable without them, stories of death and loss seem different. I realise how relatively indifferent I was, and probably still am, to my own death.

A person comes on the screen now and talks about losing all of their children, or the love of their life, and my gut churns as I dwell, momentarily, on how that might feel. Not that I know how to properly empathise with such unimaginable horror.

There is nothing else to add. I hope the numbers prove too pessimistic, I hope many more of the missing turn out to be sheltering somewhere, protected by something, alive.