As for injuries, pain is not always felt when and where it is inflicted. Grief is slow internal bleeding. And it turns out that my father was right, or almost right, about trauma being in the blood.

... the profound relationship between language and the body’s physiology - a placebo changes expectation.

Mood and emotion are a whole-body phenomena that alters the body’s physiology and chemistry, as well as how that person feels and acts.

Doctors turned to ice with emotion. The nurse who fell asleep in the middle of an operation. The infant put back together after hours of surgery, only to be killed by a bomb that fell on the hospital a moment later. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with a string around his neck, filled with teeth, proof his son had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son’s. The same man who watched his shoes being stolen from his feet by someone who thought he was dead.

Living with your nose amidst death like that, every “normal” moment in the war is etched in your mind . . . but now, in the post-war life, it seems my life can never retrieve that intensity, as if the normal is now suddenly deathly. Meaningless. I yearn for the war, yes, pining for that vividness! A firmament of sorrow envelopes my thoughts.