Wednesday. Six days after the unimaginable happened. A plane shot from the sky. Two hundred and ninety-eight innocent people dead in seconds, scattered over sunflower fields and backyards. One hundred and ninety-three of your own countrymen and women killed.

How do you deal with this kind of pain, the kind you cannot describe? Waking up before sunrise and working until you can think no more is one way of coping. Incessantly worrying about the bodies of the deceased and that people will never be able to bury their loved ones. That the small things their loved ones could have remembered them by – a ring, a book, a toy – are gone. You cannot sleep, because you need to follow every story, read every article, stay informed about every detail, because that is the only thing you can do to inform others. This has been my experience this week.

And so I’m reading articles on websites of quality newspapers about Dutch national mourning. Some of them feel like reviews of pain, with their journalists acting as thermometers, measuring the temperature of our grief.

There was one story that at first I had to stop reading halfway through. The Guardian, concluded, Dutch travellers react calmly to loss of flight MH17 after talking to some people at the airport and speaking to students having a cigarette by a canal. The journalist in question went to the queue of passengers waiting to check into another Malaysia Airlines flight bound for Kuala Lumpur. Did he expect to find no queue? That every passenger, having booked tickets and accommodation months ago and taken holiday from work, would decide after the disaster to temporarily suspend their life? That this is how one mourns? Or ought to mourn?

Another one. The Netherlands, a nation in mourning but mindful of ties to Russia, said a New York Times headline. As if anyone of us who is grieving, including officials and politicians, is seriously thinking about business and business implications right now. Or in The Straits Times, which described the stoic reaction of the Dutch, quoting the Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands to explain this as the Dutch being “very dignified”.

These sort of articles add insult to injury by trying to explain where our reaction, or lack of it at first sight, comes from. As if somehow the extent of our mourning does not meet national stereotypes. Maybe it’s because the Dutch are known to be upfront and even loudmouthed in normal situations. Perhaps there was an expectation of a public outpouring of emotion, pockets of collective grief and loud calls for retaliation.

What is wrong with describing rather than reviewing our grief? If this was the case what would be found is that there has been rationalisation as we struggle to make sense of things, along with surprisingly moderate responses from government officials. Even after Dutch mayor Pieter Broertjes called for Putin’s daughter Maria, who is said to live in Voorschoten, to be made to leave the country, he quickly apologised, saying his comments “stemmed from a feeling of helplessness”.

This has less to do with our ties with Russia than the utmost priority: to get the bodies of victims out of a rebel-held area. The worst way to do this would have been by pointing fingers without any evidence. Indeed, we are not America.

Those who have followed the social hashtag #MH17 and the speeches of Dutch politicians in response to the disaster, may have noticed the rollercoaster of emotions our nation is still experiencing. Shock and speechlessness making way for sadness and worry, soon replaced by abhorrence, confusion and rage. On Monday, our liberal prime minister declared that a day of national mourning wasn’t “within our tradition”. But even he quickly realised that this tragedy transcends tradition.

Today, as the first bodies of victims arrive in Eindhoven at around 4pm local time, the nation will hold a minute of silence. Later at Dam square in Amsterdam, there will be a silent march to commemorate the victims.

Maybe that is it. The fact that we are mute will express the extent of our pain after this unspeakable crime.