As shock at the massacre of 16 infants gave way to grief, parents spoke on Friday about the sons and daughters whose young lives were cut short by a crazed gunman.
Lynne McMaster, pregnant with her sixth child, sobbed as she recalled the last moments with her daughter Victoria, one of the victims of Thomas Hamilton who opened fire on 29 children and their teacher in a Scottish school on Wednesday."She said six bye-byes to me as she went down the path waving, looking back and laughing. Now I'll never see her again," she told The Sun newspaper.
"What am I going to do without her? Every minute, I look at her picture. Every minute I keep thinking I'll wake up and it won't be true."
Karen Turner endured nearly five hours of uncertainty at Dunblane Primary School before she learned what she had prayed she would never hear - that her daughter Megan was dead.
"Minutes seemed like hours. This was like nothing anyone could have imagined. None of the parents were brought together. We all went in at different times. It would have been too much to bear," Turner said.
"She (Megan) was so full of life, always jumping and running. She stood on her head more than she stood on her feet. She was wonderful, so special to us."
Steve and Beverly Birnie were among the lucky parents. Their son Matthew escaped with shoulder and chest wounds. He is expected to make a full recovery.
"Such innocent little children. Our thoughts are with all those parents who weren't so lucky," Beverly said.
Only one child was not injured in the class doing physical education in the school's gymnasium, bespectacled Robbie Hurst.
Shocked and dazed, a teacher found him under the body of his best friend, where he had witnessed Hamilton's murderous attack. "We still cannot believe our boy got away and we are feeling terribly mixed emotions," his 70-year-old grandfather, Jackie, said.
"On the one hand we are overjoyed that he got out alive. But we are so upset for the other wee children who died, and their parents."
Amie Adam, 5, was listed in critical condition Friday at Yorkhill Hospital in Glasgow. A bullet shattered her thigh bone, and Dr. Alasdair Fyfe said she could be permanently disabled.
But there was joy today at the home of Stewart Weir, who was sitting up and sharing toys with his 4-year-old sister after his first night at home since the shooting Wednesday. The boy had been treated for two gunshot wounds in the leg.
"I went in and said to him, `What is this I hear about you bossing all the nurses around in hospital?"' said family friend Tom Allan. "I didn't mention anything about what had happened and neither did he."
"He said `I have two wounds in my leg and I'm fine,"' Allan said.
Five-year-old Sophie was the only daughter of Mike North, a professor at Stirling University. Stirling was where 43-year-old Hamilton, a bachelor obsessed with young boys and guns, lived.
Every death in Dunblane was terribly tragic but Sophie's was even more so because her mother died of cancer two years ago.
"For a double tragedy like this to befall one man begs the question `is there a God?' " a close friend was quoted as saying.
But it was to their church, their families and each other that the parents of Dunblane turned for solace.
Psychologists said no amount of training or experience was sufficient to cope with a tragedy of this magnitude.
"Nobody can presume to know what to do in such awful circumstances as the Dunblane shooting," said Dr Mark Berelowitz, head of the Department of Child Psychology at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
"To try to tell, or even imply to parents that there is an easy way to overcome a loss of this magnitude is at best hopeless, and at worst cruel," he said.