resilience

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

My reality isn't as gracious as it use to be, so I create things that are.

For many years a tree might wage a slow and silent warfare against an encumbering wall, without making any visible progress. One day the wall would topple--not because the tree had suddenly laid hold upon some supernormal energy, but because its patient work of self-defense and self release had reached fulfillment. The long-imprisoned tree had freed itself. Nature had had her way.

But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn__ break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn__ mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother__ departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It__ efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren__ observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

Even the tiniest of flowers can have the toughest roots.

La mise en place du processus de résilience externe doit être continue autour de l'enfant blessé. Son accueil après l'agression constitue la première maille nécessaire et pas forcément verbale, pour renouer le lien après la déchirure. La deuxième maille, plus tardive, exige que les familles et les institutions offrent _ l'enfant des lieux pour y produire ses représentations du traumatisme. La troisième maille, sociale et culturelle, se met en place quand la société propose _ ces enfants la possibilité de se socialiser. Il ne reste plus qu'_ tricoter sa résilience pendant tout le reste de sa vie.

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.

True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

What we all share in common - the real reason for this book - is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn__ see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves,and for one another. We need each other to survive.I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Lookfor them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.

The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can't be cheered out of. You don't need solutions. You don't need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can't flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn't.

But the Count hadn__ the temperament for revenge; he hadn__ the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn__ the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world__ Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island__ topography, it__ climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

The more it rains and blows, the more certain we are to have him.

Today is the anniversary of my husband__ death," Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave.

The journey through another world, beyond bad dreamsbeyond the memories of a murdered generation,cartographed in captivity by bare survivorsmakes sacristans of us all.The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymnsupon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voicetransforms the ways of song to words of poetry or proseand makes distinctionsno one recognizes.Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscanson the edge of useless law; we prayto the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistlein ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chainof incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome.