From all accounts, she was one of the best and brightest, the pearl of great price, the evening star in that glittering galaxy of youth. We are overwhelmed by grief and anger over still another senseless death, one of the young people taken before their time by auto accidents, suicides and vicious killers such as the one who wandered into the life Eve Carson.

The community came together in mourning after Carson's body was found March 5. Across the UNC-CH campus, students gathered by the hundreds to grieve, leave flowers and reminisce over the loss of their friend and student leader.

By now, most mourners are moving on. The initial shock recedes, the shadows of sadness replaced by the light of living. But not for the two people who loved Eve Carson most, her parents. They wander inconsolably through their Gethsemane of grief, sentenced to endless sorrow.

Poet A.E. Housman, in "To an Athlete Dying Young" tries to comfort us at times such as these. In November 1963, when President John F. Kennedy's death was announced over the PA system at Broughton High School, my wife instinctively reached for Housman's poem and read it to her stunned and weeping students.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay ... / Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honors out.

Sweet words, yes, but of only fleeting solace. Dying young is a trivial trade-off at best for a life fully lived.

No portrayal of the anguish of a parent at the death of a child is more apt and painfully poignant than one written by a late friend, Dr. Forrest Smith Jr., greatly respected pastor of Baptist churches in North Carolina and West Virginia.

In his book, "Sit Down, God. I'm Angry!," written after the death of his 17-year-old, All-American son in a water-skiing accident, Smith addresses the complex nature of this unique grief and how to deal with it.

The book's title derives from a family custom in which Smith's three children, when they had issues with their father, would lead him to his easy chair in the den and say, "Sit down, Dad. We're angry!" There, the grievances would be resolved.

Smith's letter to his son only days after the accident is painfully poignant, especially to anyone who has lost a child.

"The hundreds of friends and scores of relatives who flooded our home for the past few days have returned to their daily run of duty," my friend wrote. "I sit alone in your room, the place where you and I have spent many, many hours, talking, discussing, raising more questions than we ever found answers.

"All the scaffolding of your short 17 years stands in deafening silence -- the catcher's mitt, bulletin board laden with girls' pictures, homecoming ribbons, stubs of special college football tickets ... Wrinkled basketball shoes, a student council T-shirt with 'president' stenciled on the back, a calendar stuffed with never to be fulfilled activities, rough drafts of term papers, an unfinished college application and assorted books lie much as you left them on your desk.

"You had just begun a course at school in Shakespeare. Soon you would have found a statement of Julius Caesar that your Dad feels describes you:

His life was gentle, and the elements / So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world, "This was a man!"

"We are struggling, my son, struggling. Our faith has been tested to the core. The rafters of our theology have trembled. We have touched the bottom, but I'm happy to report to you that the bottom is solid. We shall make it!"

Smith lets parents know that in times such as these, it's all right to be angry with God or other forces they feel are responsible for atrocities committed against the very essence of parents' souls, the taking of a child, long, long before she wore her honors out.

As violence increasingly reaps its deadly harvest, it's time for a caring and concerned society to rise up and say, "Sit down, somebody! We're angry. Very angry!"