From a terrific novel, Universal Harvester:

If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It’s true: I’ve met children who’ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense — that they don’t succumb to despair, that they don’t demand a space for their pain — it’s very true that children are resilient.

But resiliency only means that a thin retains it shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t 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 Sampson to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described by scientists. It’s efficient, flexible, and probably transferrable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

John Darnielle, Universal Harvester (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017),137.