Driving to the memorial garden before a repatriation ceremony is a dreadful experience. It is a feeling of rising nausea. You turn the long bend in Monahan Way and then see the Union Flag standing at half-mast. You know that two hours ago a plane landed and that not that far away a family watched it in a silence you cannot understand and are now with their son or daughter again.

These days we know the ceremony is about to start because the memorial bell begins to toll, calling the often hundreds gathered — bikers, veterans and residents — to make their way to the garden. It is an awful death chime and, as much as I understand and appreciate the value of the bell, I hate hearing it.

First the close family arrive. Then, some minutes later, a police outrider turns the corner and into sight, and then the hearse.

Then. Then it is hard to describe what happens. It is a wash, a flow, an outpouring of grief. Grief like you have never experienced before. The grief of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people all at once. They had held it in all day but seeing that coffin come into sight, it just comes out. And God, you sink with them.

At one ceremony a brother stood by the hearse for 10 minutes. It felt like he didn’t want to let his sibling leave. At others family members scream out and you just want to scream with them — scream at this awful situation. At another it is a Fijian family, who sing heart-wrenching gospels as the hearse approaches.

And at others there are small children. They are the worst. Afterwards the families sometimes have to leave straightaway, either to drive back hundreds of miles up north or to get to the school gates to pick up their children. But sometimes they stick around in the sports pavilion to be together and share stories and remember.

I have met some lovely people — some of the nicest people I have ever met — during this time. People who have been kind enough to speak to me and tell me about their son or daughter so that I can tell the world that they are not just a number — not just a statistic in this war that keeps taking the lives of teenagers, but a person. A person with dreams, with a childhood spent on the beach building sandcastles with now distraught brothers, with plans to leave the army and get married and have children, and now with parents who have had to experience their child dying before them.

What I always keep in mind when I do the interviews is that I have never written these stories for our readers or for my bosses or for me, I have written them for that child who was just lifted by her mother to lay a rose on the hearse carrying her father. I just hope one day she will search his name and my story will explain who he was, that he was loved, that hundreds of people turned out to pay respects and that his death meant something. But it doesn’t ever feel like it was worth this. At least, though, I and so many hundreds of others were there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her grief-stricken family, letting them know that I — that we — care.