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Good Morning In Saturday’s Daily Telegraph there’s a poignant letter from Dr Jim Swire. He lost his daughter Flora in the Lockerbie disaster. He posed the question everyone’s thinking. “Did those aboard Flight MH17 suffer?” He explained how “the moment the fuselage depressurised”, “the loss of consciousness would be virtually instantaneous.” This will come as some mitigation to the horror of those eyewitness accounts of bodies falling from the clouds, some still strapped to their seats. Towards the end of the letter he writes, “The long term consequences for relatives will cascade down the decades” and he advised professional help for the psychological and “financial repercussions”. Some beyond the emotional reach of a tragedy may think that after a period of time relatives should be able to get over it. But the tragic loss of someone you love in circumstances that surpass human understanding forever stirs the imaginings of the soul. Some years ago I was doing Thought for the Day the morning after a disaster. I listed some other tragedies. A couple of days later an angry letter arrived complaining I hadn’t mentioned a particular disaster and accusing me of being part of an establishment conspiracy of silence. I wrote back and apologised. Then came a further letter in which the correspondent also apologised. He explained: that morning he’d awoken in a deep depression; he’d lost his wife in that disaster. The emotional bond between the living and the dead is knotted differently when the one you love is wrenched out of your life. Images from Ukraine as we’ve heard this morning are unbearable for the relatives – black body bags lining the fields of sunflowers, a refrigerated train of five grey carriages. And now there are serious questions about whether these loved ones and their possessions are being treated with the dignity the dead deserve. The relatives who long to pay their respects frustrated by the posturing of national and international politics. Their raw heart ache echoes that plaintive cry in the Gospels when Mary rushes to the empty grave of Christ and weeps, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” How she longed to see and, yes, touch his disfigured body. These are the yearnings of the bereaved, to have contact with those they’ve lost. For when grief leaves you lost for words it’s the touch that tells what’s in your soul. As Shakespeare observed, “The grief that does not speak Whispers the over fraught (o’erfraught) heart And bids it break.”