Managing

I have to say I was a little thrown yesterday when I read this harrowing article from Saturday's Guardian. In it, Lindsay Nicholson describes how she lost her husband and then her daugher to leukaemia.

There really is very little to say by way of trying to understand how somebody can get through such a thing intact, except that I suppose they don't. I suppose that people somehow get on with their lives in spite of the terrible things that happen. We expect people to overcome the crippling weight of grief, but maybe we're wrong. Instead, their grief just becomes as much a part of person's sense of self as the colour of their eyes or the lines on their face. The self is nothing but the accumulated residue of experience.