A little while ago, maybe two or three months, I had one of those strange experiences that start as a small, insignificant moment and become something quite different.

I saw a woman who was a mutual friend with one of the girls I lived with in student accommodation while I was at uni. I’d fallen out of contact with my former housemate some years ago, and had been thinking for a while that I’d like to contact her just to see where she was up to. I casually asked our mutual friend if she’d been in contact with my former housemate and the outcome of that question, that I almost hadn’t even asked, was to discover my friend has a very young child who had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment.

Tonight I learnt that her little boy is not going to make it. There’s nothing more that can be done. And while I’m crying for that tiny boy who in his short life has experienced more pain and suffering than anyone should have to go through in a lifetime, I keep imagining what it must be like - but I can’t really.

How can you face life without your child? How can you pack a lifetime of love into the pitifully few shorts days you’ve been given? How do you even stop thinking about the nightmare long enough to savour those precious moments ou have left? How do you contemplate a life that’s hardly begun being over so soon? All your dreams and hopes … I don’t know how you can face that and stay sane.

It sounds so banal to say it but it makes me realise and remember how very blessed I am. When I’m frustrated and tired and sick of it all … I can’t even finish that sentence, it makes me feel sick.

I am uncomfortably aware that everything I’ve written is the same thing everyone says in a situation like this but the situation itself is so wrong, there is a kind of numbness that goes with it, and you can only think in cliches and banalities.

Sometimes, life really sucks.