I watched her as she pushed open the door and walked to the table where I sat waiting. I had last seen her – was it a year ago? – as she sat before the coffin that held the body of her husband.

Was it only a brief year before that when I had watched her sitting next to her husband and daughter, staring at the casket that contained the body of her only son?

Nigel had been robbed and stabbed to death as he made his way home from the small job he had as a disc jockey, his mutilated body dumped in a cane field.

I can still see myself standing in the back yard, a dripping hose in one hand – I had been watering the garden - and the cordless telephone in the other, as her voice, breaking with grief and untold pain, announced the horrendous news, “Yvonne, they have killed my son.” I remember the nightmarish blur of the next few days as we awaited the arrival of her only daughter from Austin, Texas.

I can still recall waiting at the lights at the Grand Bazaar intersection, with eyes blinded by tears. I had managed to pull in at a tyre shop, and getting out from behind the wheel, I put my head on the bonnet of the car, and wept as though my heart would break. In the two years that had passed, my sister-in-law had lost both her son and husband. As she greeted me now, I could see the vacant look in her eyes and my heart bled at how much older she looked, at how grief and sorrow had ravaged her face and aged her - it seemed almost overnight.

And yet…

There was a smile on her face and an air of serenity about her as though she had accepted that life had dealt her all the blows that it possibly could and that no other pain could or would touch her in the same way as those she had already borne.

Over lunch, we spoke in a desultory manner of this and that.

She was now a proud grandmother and had just returned from visiting her grandson in Texas where her daughter, Nicole and son-in-law lived. And as she talked about her visit and how enchanting her grandson was, I realised that she had crossed the Rubicon of pain and sorrow and had emerged on the other side, healed and almost whole.

She had bled but not been broken.

And she had managed to do this by trying to understand “why bad things happen to good people”, by “healing the hurts she had not really deserved”, and by moving from anger and bitterness to a place of healing and peace.

I have always believed that, for a parent, there is no greater grief than having to bury a child. Somehow, to my mind, it goes against what is normal, what is expected. In other words, in the normal scheme of things, the child would bury the parent, not the other way around.

Another phrase that I have questioned is that where people talk of someone grieving to death. I no longer question this having seen my brother literally grieve himself to death, just over a year after he had buried his beloved son, my nephew Nigel.

Lewis B. Smedes, in his book Forgive and Forget, tells us of the “miracle of forgiving”, a miracle which, he says, hardly anyone notices.

He identifies this miracle as something we do on our own.

“We do it alone – in the private place of our inner selves.

We do it silently – no one can record our miracles on tape.

We do it invisibly – no one can record our miracles on film. We do it freely – no one can ever trick us into forgiving someone.”

At the end of it all, he says, when we have scrambled back from the edge of the pit of despair, when we have been able to put the feelings of having been dealt a ‘rotten’ hand, when we have worked through the conflicting emotions and finally are able to forgive those who have trespassed against us, then and only then are we able to “heal the hurt we never deserved.”

My sister-in-law has my admiration and love. She has been dealt two of the most horrendous blows any woman will ever know.

Yet the face she shows to the world is one of compassion and understanding.

Some years ago, when I was going through a similar period of pain and grief, my niece Nicole wrote to me saying, “Remember Auntie, the finest steel is forged in the hottest fire.”

Nicole would be the first to recognise the fine steel that lies just under the veneer of her mother’s calm acceptance, compassion and understanding.