Chapter 13 - Flanders

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The soldiers return home, hoping, yearning for the pastoral of yesteryear but life has moved on. They move from the alien to the alien. Everything has changed and their dreams have turned to dust. The old world has been swept away. They are so weary, they thought the fight was over, and their will to carry on sometimes falters. For some there is nothing left because they have given their all. They wander lost and listless.

The world looks on and grows bored. In a short time there is another war, another battle. All is forgotten.

Those involved do not forget. They try to reconcile themselves with what really happened. They try to come to terms with events which they cannot really explain to those who were not there. This was a displaced world in which the unreal became the normal. Now there was the long haul back.

And so it was with Max.

How do you cope with the death of your child? We cope because most of us have this little store of 'Superstrength' which no-one tells you about. It is this magic stuff which comes from deep down inside and lets you get by when by all rights you should not. It is what keeps your mind vaguely together through wars, massacres and concentration camps and all the other awful things we do to each other.

SuperS is great stuff. You don't have to consciously fight for strength because it's just there, ready and waiting. SuperS is not magic, it exists, but it obeys one of the oldest rules in the book. This is the Free Lunch rule. There's no such thing as a Free Lunch. There is always the small print. The innocuous clause you ignore, or raises faint alarm bells which quickly subside. There is always risk, there is always a trade off and so it is with SuperS.

Everyone around you marvels when SuperS kicks in,. "They are incredible, I don't know how they cope." But they don't know about SuperS or the associated fine print. The fine print consists of just two words - 'Everyone pays'. The strange thing is that the print is not that fine. In fact if you read books about extremes of the human condition you know that everyone pays, but it's not clear how that payment is made.

'Everyone Pays' means that SuperS only lasts as long as it's needed. When the crisis is over there are three alternatives payment methods and none of them is Visa.

There is a volcano sitting above all these subterranean and subconscious stresses which have been held back for so long and that volcano has to somehow release its pent up pressures.

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