It was the opposite of calm; it was a shock so total that it came out looking like calm.

When a blow is large enough, past a certain threshold, the ordinary reactions, the screaming and the weeping and the collapse, do not come, or do not come first.

What comes first, for some people, is a strange, glassy stillness, a sense of standing slightly outside your own body and watching the situation with an almost clinical detachment.

That is what descended on me in the kitchen, and I have come to think of it as the analyst taking over from the wife.

The wife wanted to fall to the floor.