The Sutherland Springs, Texas, church massacre seems significantly different from other such tragedies.

It involves the size of the community. The town has about 400 residents. That’s it. The Sunday morning shooting killed or wounded 46 people. That’s about 10 percent of the entire town’s population.

I am not belittling other cities’ tragedies. Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston all have suffered terribly, too. Family members in those larger communities terribly, just as they are in Sutherland Springs.

I am inclined to believe, though, that Sutherland Springs’ collective grief will last forever, or at least until the final surviving community member passes from the scene.

I have swallowed hard several times as I’ve watched the news reporting from Sutherland Springs. What is most heartbreaking is to hear from those who knew the victims and to hear from them how “everyone knows everyone” in Sutherland Springs.

Three generations of a single family, eight people, died in the shooting. The 14-year-old daughter of the First Baptist Church pastor and his wife also died. An 18-month-old infant was among those who died at the hand of the monster who opened fire.

Just how does a community recover from this degree of madness?

Too many communities already have been tagged with a title none of them ever welcomes: the place where gun-related violence erupted. The larger cities do have the opportunity to move farther away from their collective pain.

The tiny town of Sutherland Springs — with a single blinking traffic light — likely has seen its identity changed forever.

It is all simply heartbreaking in the extreme.