We're supposed to be objective; but this is deeply personal. We're in the business of getting pieces up as quickly as we can; I've been sitting on this one for months. Usually we pitch for a big audience; here I am, deliberately writing for just a handful in Australia.

First, about the timing – it's Christmas. My dislike of the sentimental overkill in the US at this time of year seems to be crumbling - I like that a voice on the surgery PA system croons I'll Be Home for Christmas. But the whole festivity thing and the idea of being home, or in this case not being home, makes this an appropriate time. It helps too that at this time of year Australians are planting stuff in their gardens.

Now, about the audience. I'm writing for the families and friends of the 38 from Australia who died when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 disintegrated in midair and crashed into fields of sunflowers in eastern Ukraine in July, after the Boeing 777 was struck by a missile fired in a separatist war that was tearing apart the former Soviet republic.

This was chaos writ large - an appalling aviation disaster at the epicentre of a brutal nationalist conflict.

Accompanied by my ever-resourceful photographer colleague Kate Geraghty, I spent weeks in and around the crash site, negotiating hourly with rebel fighters, Ukrainian government forces, European conflict monitors and Australian police and aviation investigators for access to the site.

One way or another all delivered, giving us access that was denied to the families and friends – save for a brave Perth couple who simply refused to heed the warnings that it was too dangerous for them to come to Ukraine's Donetsk province.

Cooling our heels as we waited for a lull in the fighting to make a dash from Point A to Point B, Geraghty and I fell to talking about the families and some kind of meaningful memento that might be brought to them from the site. As an Australian news team on the ground, it seemed we were the only ones with freedom of movement and who were not present in any official Australian capacity who might bring something back for them.

First we thought of a handful of dirt from the fields. But on every drive to the scene of the crash, I was struck by the sunflowers, their nodding heads a sea of yellow that cloaked much of the horror of sprawling site.

I fixed on the idea that the families should be offered a small parcel of sunflower seeds. They could plant them immediately; or put them in a bottom drawer until a time when they felt their grief might be ameliorated by having a bunch of Ukrainian sunflowers at the bottom of the garden or nodding their heads outside a window. A reminder of sad loss to be sure; but hopefully it would be a consoling one.

I panicked when we observed harvesters moving into some of the fields. For this to work as I envisaged, it was essential that the seeds be from the crop that was growing at the time of the crash. These were to be seeds with precise meaning.

The threat posed by the harvesters left me thinking that a force greater than Geraghty and myself was needed.

Naively perhaps, I figured this was a task that should be taken on by Canberra – surely the government could buy a single farmer's sunflower crop and work out some time later on the how, where and when of distributing the seeds. Maybe Canberra could invite the governments of the other 260 passengers and crew of flight MH17 to accept quantities of the seed, for distribution to the families and friends of those victims.

I reached out to Tony Abbott's staff asking for an opportunity to explain all this to the Prime Minister, but there was no response.

By the time we were to leave separatist-controlled Donetsk, from which we ventured out daily to cover the crash and the war, the local airport had been destroyed – we'd have to drive.

We headed out of the city before dawn. On a highway strewn with the smouldering wreckage of vehicles destroyed in the previous night's fighting, some with bodies still lying in or near them, we threaded our way through rebel checkpoints, back to what we had dubbed "the cockpit village".

This was Rassypnoe, a hamlet in which locals watched in awe as MH17's nose cone smashed into a field of shoulder-high sunflowers, just metres from buildings on the village's western flank.

When we visited the village in the last week of July, Eugene Lukovkin, a 30-year-old separatist gunman, gave us a graphic account of the crash – "bodies falling like bullets"; the nose section making a muffled sound, "like it landed in a swamp".

Recalling that he had been disposing of his grandmother's trash, Lukovkin told me: "The plane headed towards me. I could see the smoke as it fell to pieces – it had been missiled. One section was coming at me and the rest of it seemed to keep going. I dumped the rubbish cart and started running; others were running too – we think maybe some of the falling people are alive.

"There were lots of bodies – dead." Pointing to the left side of the cockpit, he says: "This is where one of the pilots was – I knew he was in charge because he had stars on his shoulder."

When we returned at dawn on our last day, none of the locals were to be seen. We drove to the field in which the buckled cockpit lay and quietly went to work – chopping enough sunflower heads to fill a big suitcase that we had bought at the market for this purpose. No one came to ask what we were doing.

Thirty minutes later we were back on the road, driving north to the Ukrainian government-controlled city of Kharkiv, from where we caught a commercial flight to the capital Kiev.

Rather than lug the suitcase any further, I spent the evening in my hotel room breaking open the sunflower heads and bagging the seeds. There's enough for 80 or maybe 100 small parcels should anyone want some.

More than 25 years as a correspondent have taught me to curb sentimentality as I observe the unreasonable randomness of pain, suffering and uncertainty in this world.

But the 38 from Australia were so minding their own business when they were murdered at 30,000 feet over eastern Ukraine. They'll not be home for Christmas.

Back in that DC surgery, my wait was short. Despite being told that the doctor would probably make five or six cuts before I'd get an all-clear, the first report back from the pathologists was something of an anticlimax – all the cancer cells had been removed in that first cut.

Yes, I'm home for Christmas – with a silly bandage on my forehead, but as healthy as an ox. Not being home, for a loved one to be never coming home, must be so very difficult for their families and friends.

Families and friends of the MH17 victims can contact Paul McGeough at mcgeough@mcgeough.org if they would like to receive some of the sunflower seeds. The privacy of correspondence will be respected.