Fear that grips every mother’s heart . . .

Every day, at 3.30pm, as soon as school’s out, it begins. The fretting — and texting. First, though, I call. ‘Hi!’ says my daughter’s chirpy little voice at the end of the line, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take your call — but please leave a message.’

Like most people under 30 she never answers her phone, but sometimes I ring straight back just to hear her again. It makes me feel close to her. Then I text. Where are you? What are your plans? Don’t forget you’ve got the dentist — the usual boring mummy things.

What I really want, of course, is to have her home, safe and sound. But she’s a teenager, she’s growing up, beginning to spread her wings and assert control over her life.

The minutes pass. I keep the phone constantly by my side, so as not to miss her call. eventually, she rings and the relief is immense. She hasn’t been run over or mugged. She’s on the bus with her friends, they went to Nando’s. She hangs up and texts me a string of heart emojis. I am happy again.

It’s a parent- child ritual played out a million times a minute all across the world. And most of the time our fears are unfounded.

Tragically, this was not the case for one mother, Mina Justice, whose son was killed this week when a crazed Islamist gunman opened fire in a nightclub in Orlando.

Mina was sound asleep when the first message came through from her son eddie, a 30- year- old accountant. It was 2:06am, and it said simply: ‘Mommy, I love you.’

Over the following 44 excruciating minutes — the last of her boy’s life — they exchanged increasingly desperate texts.

I can imagine only too well the rising sense of panic as eddie begged his mother for help. ‘In club they shooting’; ‘Pulse [the name of the club]. Downtown. Call police.’ Then at 2:08am: ‘I’m gonna die.’

As the horror unfolded, more texts. With each one, terror; but also hope — confirmation he was still alive. ‘Call them [the police] Mommy. Now. He’s coming.’ And then, just before 3am, their final exchange.

‘Hurry,’ he wrote. ‘He’s in the bathroom with us.’ Her last message read simply: ‘I love u.’ eddie never replied.

Atrocities such as this one always strain the brain’s capacity for comprehension. But there is something about the real-time recording of America’s worst-ever mass shooting — in text and social media messages — that stretches beyond barbarity into whole new dimensions of human suffering.

For the relatives of the dead, there’s the hell of being in close contact with their doomed loved ones yet unable to physically touch or comfort them.

How I pity eddie’s mother — a virtual witness at her son’s murder yet utterly powerless to help.

It must have felt like trying — and inevitably failing — to reach out and grasp a rainbow.

equally haunting is the short video taken by Amanda Alvear, a beautiful 25- year- old nursing assistant and another victim.

AT FIRST, it’s just footage of people larking around; then the recording catches confusion on Amanda’s face. The music stops and shots ring out. The screen goes dead.

What heartbreaking proof of the fragility of human life. But it’s also, for the millions who have now seen her film online, a strange and prurient act of intrusion.

We’ve become used to people sharing their most intimate moments, but death feels like the final taboo. It cannot always be peaceful, but shouldn’t it at least be private?

Death here is not just a madman with an assault rifle. It also teeters dangerously on the verge of entertainment, something we click on with the same ease with which we’d view a film trailer or a funny video of a cat. But this is the end of a human life. Surely it deserves more solemnity.