One week ago many dozens of children were killed in Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday attacks. Dressed in their finest clothes for one of the most important church services of the year, this was the first generation in decades to grow up free of violence.
Their stories - and the struggle for the surviving children to comprehend the carnage - take the island down a devastatingly familiar path.
When bubbly Sneha Savindri Fernando went along for the Easter Sunday service at St Sebastian's church in Negombo, her mind was on something else entirely. She had spent weeks excitedly making plans for her 13th birthday - a day she would never get the chance to celebrate.
"She was like a little bird. She loved to dance. She danced to anything. If you asked her to dance, she would immediately jump into a sari or a long skirt and oblige," her mother, Nirasha Fernando says. Sneha, Ms Fernando and their neighbours Gayani and Tyronne all left together in Tyronne's auto-rickshaw.
Only Nirasha came back.
Sneha was among many children who died when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the church in the Negombo community of Katuwapitiya. At almost that precise moment five other locations, churches and hotels, were hit by bombers.
The softest of targets
It was the first thing that first responders I talked to noticed as soon as they walked into the churches that had been targeted: the large number of children among the dead. The overall number of casualties from the attacks is unclear but officials believe children could end up accounting for more than a fifth of the final death toll.
This is because the bombers' targets were the softest of them all - morning church services on a major religious festival and luxury hotels where families settled down to Sri Lanka's generous breakfast buffets.
Now Sneha's mother Nirasha gazes in anguish at her daughter's photo. Part of the bomb embedded itself in her upper lip - a constant irritant, a permanent physical mark and reminder of her loss.
"We called her duwani (daughter) at home. She was my first. I rocked her to sleep... I held her in my hands... I brought her up with so much love and now she's gone."
They were in the third pew of the church - very close to the front - when the bomb went off. The damage to Sneha's body was so severe she was brought home in a sealed casket.
"I couldn't even see her face," Nirasha says blankly.
A hall in another Negombo home hosts an unbearable scene Four open caskets lie next to each other. Three contain bodies of children: siblings Rashini Praveesha aged 14, Shalomi Himaya, nine, and Shalom Shathiska who was seven.
Shocked relatives keep walking into the house as though to confirm the truth of what they are seeing.
An elderly relative enters and immediately becomes incoherent with grief. "Shalom! Shalom! Our youngest, our baby," she says, almost falling on to his coffin. "You were always so naughty, you always loved playing tricks on us. Get up my baby, please get up!"
Relatives rush in and take her away, even as she keeps shouting.
It is a similar story in the eastern coastal town of Batticaloa on the other side of the country. Like Negombo, Batticaloa is adorned with banners strung up to commemorate the dead, many of them children.
BBC
BDST: 1228 HRS, APR 28, 2019
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