And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.

My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.

But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children's lives.

But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels.

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.

I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.