Summary

The author begins this chapter with the story of Tim Chambers, a painter who is legally blind and mostly deaf as the result of experiencing a rare childhood disease. She writes of how Tim’s father taught him to turn diversity into an opportunity for humor or into an advantage, or both, and suggests that exploring the skill to turn perceptions of suffering around, without denying their reality, is a key point in teaching kids resilience.

The author then describes the painful moments when she told her children that their father had died. She reveals how she consulted with psychologists about the best way to tell them; how her children managed to think of how upset others might be even while they themselves were suffering; and how their grief tended to come in relatively short, concentrated bursts, rather than in...