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warn, what might sometimes look like a short-term decline in mental health can actually be a sign of the human psyche rallying its resources for ultimate recovery.
    Hardship does have the capacity to make us hardier. A recent study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , for example, found that some of those who have experienced multiple stressful events in life become more robust—picking themselves up and integrating their lessons faster than those who haven’t experienced many losses or life changes. Resilience, it turns out, can be like a muscle, growing stronger with use.
    Another recent study, this one aptly titled “That Which Doesn’t Kill Us Can Make Us Stronger (and More Satisfied with Life)” and appearing in the journal Psychology & Health , found that identifying oneself as a “survivor” is actually positively correlated with life satisfaction. In other words, those who have been through hell and made it out feel like life is a bit more heavenly than those who never have to struggle through such darkness.
    In this book, we look at the ways in which these resilient people took their grief and remolded it, bringing new meaning into their lives. They mourned, and continue to do so in various ways, but also carried on as an affirmation of life’s preciousness and the heart’s capacity for renewal.
    But they didn’t do it alone. So often, the eight survivors featured in this book were and still are deeply supported by caring communities—both informal and formal. Their families, friends, and extended networks stand as testament to the healing power of simple and profound presence and love. One hand held after the next, one hug given and received after the next, one sad or angry sentiment articulated and heard after the next. In Bishop Stephen Paul Bouman’s moving book, Grace All Around Us: Embracing God’s Promise in Tragedy and Loss , he relays relying on the powerful wisdom of a South African bishop post-9/11: “In our culture, when tragedy happens, we don’t all visit at once. We come a few at a time so that each time the person in sorrow has to answer the door and tell the story again of what happened and shed the tears. As the story is told again and again, healing can begin.”
    The survivors’ caregivers, therapists, support groups, and spiritual mentors also show up in these pages—people whose commitment to their work and engagement with the people they care for is deeply moving, particularly in the face of such destruction. Disaster, as a subject, has been around, at least in the American context, since we first took stock of what was lost—so many lives, rigid social roles, a sense of abundance—following World War II. The idea of disaster mental health, more specifically, was first put on the conceptual map with Erikson’s 1976 book, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood , in which he asked, “What is ‘disaster,’ anyway?” and then answered in a way that reads as eerily prescient when considering our subject, an event that wouldn’t take place for twenty-five years yet: “a sharp and furious eruption of some kind that splinters the silence for one terrible moment and then goes away.” Erikson, like us, centered the voices of the victims of that tragedy, arguing that they deserved a more researched and skilled response from professionals in the mental health field.
    Great caregivers, psychologists, sociologists, and the like have heeded his call ever since, creating institutes, field guides, journals, and coalitions in order to constantly perfect our capacity to respond in moments of crisis to those who need it most. As Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, author of Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others , writes, “Many of us who do frontline work to ease trauma and bring about social and environmental change