As feelings go, the sympathy we have or don’t have for people facing trying times can be particularly tough to wrestle with.

Opinions on who deserves sympathy, and how much should be doled out, are most certainly personal and don’t always conform to the bounds of reason.

Few would argue however that the loss of a child is the one thing that draws sympathy from everyone, even across battle lines and across cultures.

Anyone who has a child, I’m sure, but also those who don’t, can not help but ache for a parent who loses one, whether to violence, or disease, or the occasional unblinking cruelty of fate. It is, quite simply, the most awful thing most of us can imagine.

The subject of loss came up last week, after I received a phone call from David Woodfin Sr.

Woodfin’s son was charged last week with fatally shooting a relative in the driveway of another family member’s home.

This father was not asking for sympathy, just trying to say that the facts of the matter had been slightly misunderstood. Woodfin did not disavow his son, but he didn’t defend him either. The tone of his voice was one of bewilderment, tinged with the sound of loss.

He mentioned, when asked what this tragedy had done to his family, that it had actually brought them closer together.

After all, he said quietly, “We’ve both lost a son.”

People of Powhatan, we are losing too many sons. I know two families who have been shattered by the two homicides that have occurred in Powhatan in the last several weeks. But there are many more victims that that.

Perhaps those whose children commit these acts do not deserve the same kind of sympathy we receive for those whose children are murdered, those who will never see their children again. That is certainly something everyone has the right to decide for himself. But to push aside the fact that each of the four people currently awaiting trial for murder in this county has a family who is suffering is also a mistake.

There are at least four mothers who have seen the promise that they once had for their child completely destroyed.

There are four fathers who, you can almost be sure, wanted so much more than this for their children.

We can, as detached observers, choose to blame the families of the accused for what has happened to Tahliek Taliaferro on June 24, or to Donald Malkemus on August 1. Or we can wish the best for them, and hope that justice is swift and they can move on with their lives.

The one thing we know for sure is that those lives will never be the same.

Condemning the families for the sins of the children may be convenient, and may even be warranted in some cases, but it won’t help us heal any faster.