6
" had often heard it said that people took grief differently. He wasn’t sure he agreed. They might outwardly react in different ways, but when you got right down to it, what grief did was tear your life in half. Life before your loss and life after your loss. There was always a disconnect. Some people let it all hang out, some people rammed it into a hole deep inside and rolled a heavy stone over it, some people pretended it wasn’t happening. But speak to them years later and they were always able to date memories in terms of their loss. ‘Your dad was still alive then,’ or ‘That was after our Margaret died.’ It was as precise as BC and AD. Come to think of it, that had been about grief and loss too, whatever your views on the authenticity of Jesus as the son of God. In his role as a profiler, he mostly got to meet people when they were on the wrong side of the chasm of grief. "
― Val McDermid , Fever of the Bone (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #6)
