"when something happens to someone else, people often use the word 'unbearable'. living through a childs death, a spouses, enduring some other kind of permanent loss - its unbearable, its too awful to be borne, and the person or people to whom it's happened take on a kind of horrible glow in your mind, because they are in fact bearing it, or trying to: doing the thing thats impossible to do. The glow can be blinding at first - it can be all you see - and although it diminishes as years pass it never goes out entirely, so that late some night when you are wandering the back pathways of your mind you may stop at the sudden sight of someone up ahead, signalling even now with a faint but terrible light"