These tragedies must end.
The rich can fail to develop sensible long-term financial plans of the kind that all of us can and should do; they still have to cope with the emotional fallout of personal tragedies like Sandberg's.
During a special mass to mark the centenary of the mass killing, the pontiff referred to "three massive and unprecedented tragedies" of the past century.
While Kennedy's unexpected death at the age of 55 prompted friends to reflect on his troubled relationship with alcohol and the series of family tragedies which had placed him under cumulative stress in recent years, others emphasised that his spirits had been relatively buoyant despite his general election defeat in early May.
The head of Network Rail has demanded a dramatic change in the "macho" culture on the railways, saying that unsafe working practices are causing "appalling tragedies" and hundreds of casualties each year.
Their message was echoed by Pope Francis, who said: "Let's unite our efforts so that tragedies like this don't happen again.
"It's based on a series of tragedies in the town I lived in when I was growing up, and the terrible time it was for the adults and the children, although the adults never talked to the children about it, no one I know had an adult talk to them about it, so we invented scenarios of what this all meant," she said.
Sierra Leone has endured two tragedies in the past two decades – first the civil war from 1991 until 2002, in which an estimated 50,000 people died and then the Ebola crisis.
Globe told him: "Sgt First Class Johnson's loss was one of the sad tragedies in what was going on in Iraq in 2007.
While survivors are ferried to the relative safety of islands such as Lampedusa and Sicily, and victims disappear for ever, the impact of these tragedies will reverberate as far as Brussels, where the EU stands accused of dereliction of duty.
Yet since the start of 2010 the two men have endured parallel scandals and personal tragedies that have resulted in questions about whether they remain in leadership roles both in their parties and in Robinson's case the country.
