In Annecy, a child witnesses murder. It can't be sewn into 'normal'

Is forgetting or rationalising such trauma the best path to a normal life? That is perhaps asking the wrong question
A police officer carries flowers across the lawn to the house the al-Hilli family
A police officer in Claygate, England carries flowers from a well wisher to the house of the al-Hilli family. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When human tragedies happen, one of the most unsettling aspects of their aftermath often concerns survivors and their future. In the case of the four-year-old girl miraculously found alive after eight hours underneath the murdered bodies of her family in Annecy, France, many will wonder whether she can hope to have anything like a "normal life".

Psychologists are already rushing to give their prognoses and to offer suggestions for treatment. Some say she mustn't be forced to relive the horror; others recommend she be helped to confront the reality of her parents' and grandmother's deaths by being allowed to see their bodies. Having had the extraordinary misfortune to be caught up in such a horrific event and then the equally incredible luck to have survived it, she can hardly be expected to grow up unaffected. But what can the people around her do best to help her live with what's happened? Would it be better for her to remember, or to forget? What kind of remembering would be most helpful? And is forgetting even a real option? If she isn't helped, at some point, to understand and articulate her thoughts about those appalling events, surely they will be liable to erupt in some unprocessed form further down the line; things like that don't just go away.

It's hard to imagine how someone so young might experience something so extreme and unusual. Most teenagers and adults in the modern world will have watched countless representations of violence in films and on TV and might at least have some kind of framework in place for conceptualising and describing even the most harrowing events. The British cyclist who found the bodies described the scene as being like something from a movie, presumably because this gave him a reference point from which to understand what he was seeing. But a small child, one hopes, is unlikely to have sat through the endless stories about assaults and murders that constitute mainstream entertainment. Cruelty and bloodshed won't have been "normalised" for them. Still, most young children show a perfect awareness of the grizzlier side of life through nightmares and waking fears of animals, strangers and monsters. More often than not the adults around them will have to work to convince them that they are safe – that bogeymen don't exist and that strange noises aren't the sign of imminent disaster (and then, when they are grown up, they can both relive and demonstrate mastery over their childish fears of immolation by watching Saw III or Wallander).

To be so young and to have witnessed at first hand such brutality is to be robbed of all the comforting ideas that we build around ourselves and our children – that if you're good then no harm will come to you and that your family will be there to protect you. To try to re-instil such soothing fictions in a human being who's had them ripped away so forcibly may be to try to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted. Why believe in them when they've been proven so untrue? But then how to live a normal life without such placatory illusions? Should a person be persuaded that everything really can go back to normal? Or could it be more helpful to give up on any standard notion of normality?

What exactly is a "normal life"? One where the person feels able to love and be loved, while also making a living? If so, there are enough abnormal lives being lived to make a mockery of the distinction. Perhaps, rather than betting everything on a return to normality, it can be far more helpful to think about ways in which people might somehow be able to give a place to experiences that can't be integrated into everyday life. Rather than trying to sew everything up – either by forgetting it or by attempting to rationalise it – it may be more true to the experience to acknowledge that certain aspects of it might never be synthesised or accepted, and to try to find ways to live with that.

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