spirit

I was talking to one of my students today, and she told me that her grandmother had lived through the Holocaust. She spent two years in Auschwitz as a teenager.

- Does she talk about it?, I asked.

- She does now, my student said.

Apparently the grandmother has started talking about her experiences after her husband died. My student told me that she says that his death is the greatest tragedy of her life. Somehow living through that tragedy makes it possible for her to talk about what is now the second most difficult thing she has been through, the concentration camp.

This reminds me of Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of presidential candidate John Edwards. She has said that breast cancer isn't hard for her, because she has already lived through the worst day of her life - the day her teenage son died.

What we learn? We learn that people who has faced death think that life, in any form, is better.