A while back, I sat down to interview a bloke about his teenage daughter.

Tragically, we weren’t talking about how well she’d gone at school or on the sporting field – we were talking about how she’d been killed in a car accident just days before.

Fifteen years of age and her life had been snuffed out like a candle.

The family was preparing for her funeral and a steady stream of relatives and friends was arriving at the house to pay their respects while we spoke.

I don’t remember exactly what he said but I know I had nothing to offer him as he told me what a great kid his daughter had been and how much he loved her.

What do you say to a father in that situation?

What I do remember so clearly from that day was the look in his eyes.

He was clearly haunted by what had happened and the pain was there for all the world to see.

Here was a man who had seen and done a lot of things in his life – a bloke I knew I would rather have backing me up than standing against me – and I was watching as his world crumbled.

His only daughter was gone and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

It didn’t matter if he was a hard man, no more than it would have mattered if he had a million dollars – there wasn’t a single thing he could do to bring back his little girl.

Every time another Sunshine Coast teenager dies in a tragic accident, I remember the grief and hopelessness I saw in his eyes that day and I know that if I could look into the eyes of every other grieving father or mother I would see exactly the same thing.

I’m sorry if you came here looking for your usual light-hearted banter but it’s been a bit depressing lately.

You see I work weekends at the Daily and that’s when the kids tend to wipe themselves out.

I was working the day Nakita Deacon, Joel Doyle and Travis Guerin died at Mountain Creek.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was also working when Craig “Skippy” Park came off his motorbike on Aerodrome Road and was killed instantly.

He was just 21.

I was working the other day when a bit of skylarking went horribly wrong and Tyson Leader fell from the 24th floor balcony of a Gold Coast resort.

He was 17.

I was working last weekend when David Blackman died in a crash up near Gympie.

He was 15.

I don’t know why it’s happening – why so many of our young ones are dying tragically.

Are they any more reckless than we were as kids?

I don’t know.

Are they dying in any greater numbers?

It sure feels like it.

I do know that I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of going to work and organising newspapers that tell stories of teenagers dying.

I’m sick of having to tell one of my journalists that today they’ll be writing about another young life cut short.

I’m sick of that feeling I get in my gut every time I hear of a teenager’s death and wonder for a sickening minute if it’s one of my own kids.

I’m sick of remembering that look in a grieving father’s eyes and knowing that out there, somewhere, another kid’s parents are going through the same indescribable suffering.

And just like he did that day, they’ll be telling someone that they don’t understand what went wrong and they wish they had done things differently.

But it hurts them even more to know, deep down inside, that there was probably nothing they could have done.

Or maybe a thousand things.

They’ll never know for sure.

And they don’t want to hear that only the good die young or that their child went out the way they would have wanted.

They just want to hear the sound of their voice floating down the hallway, singing along to that awful bloody music they’ve asked them to turn down a million times.

But if they had their time over again, they’d probably learn the words so they can sing along too.

And when the song’s over, they’d probably grab their kid in a great big hug and never, ever let them go.

If they could have their time over again.