When a young person dies, rabbis often retell the story of Rabbi Meir and his wife Beruriah, whose two young sons died on Shabbat.

Beruriah finds her sons’ lifeless bodies in their beds while Rabbi Meir is at Havdalah services. When he arrives home, she doesn’t tell him right away that they have died. Instead, she tells him a mashal, a parable, about a king who has loaned his most precious possessions to a couple for safekeeping,
& has now decided to take them back. She asks her learned husband if they must return the king’s possessions. Meir grasps the subtext of her story immediately.