I think it was a bereavement counsellor, or one of a number of other therapists, who told me about learned behaviour.
"Deportation is like bereavement, it's a huge loss and if there's no help, the streets will take you," says project coordinator Claudia Portela.
It's a bit like going through bereavement or cancer, but no one knows what's happening to you".
"It is a terrible bereavement for each of us.
In part it has been a bereavement, a coming to terms with the fact that they will never meet their natural parents, that the lives that had been intended for them have been irretrievably lost.
It's an invaluable term when dealing with bereavement, as anyone who has sent a condolence letter knows.
And, as the title suggests, health, or the lack of it, is a recurring preoccupation: bereavement, cancer, accidents, Alzheimer's - even, glancingly, the war in Iraq, are the prevailing subjects; and the characters are now between 45 and 56, "the riskiest decade for tumours".
It is a sort of bereavement for parents - you have lost the child that might have been". Is she concerned about a possible link between autism and the MMR vaccination against childhood diseases?
"One evening my father asked me what the book was about, which was a strange question when he knew I was writing about Ella, and I said, 'I think it is a book about bereavement'".
It is a bit like a bereavement.
