Often when I read news reports about deaths in places I consider far off or perhaps, “war-torn” such as Syria or parts of Sudan, I wonder if we have any value for life at all.

When people are killed, no one seems to realise that they are more than faces on a television or names in a manifesto or just hapless victims of Death’s sickle.

Each one lost to a mindless attack is a life with a story; family who love her, friends she has appointments with, men with children and the tendency to work on some weekends, who drank tea with too little milk but a little too much sugar. These are children who liked art class best and enjoyed stories from uncles who really should visit more.

The dead are people with places they’d not yet been, favourite foods and hobbies they thought they should spend more time on. They are people, not statistics. Sometimes they were angry and spoke out of turn, Some of them were scared of needles.

Others even cried when they laughed.

Taking out one person destroys an entire cycle of related beings because no one exists in total isolation. Even when no family or friends exist, there is someone who has seen ‘him’ often, or knows of ‘her’. Yet when their lives are taken, it is in isolation….because everyone one dies alone.

To extinguish a life is the highest form of evil because it steals more than a body, it deletes a soul and halts potential.

To take a life is to take what was, is and will be.