She had lost her companion, her child, and her nurse — three deaths in conditions of extreme hardship, with the responsibility of surviving falling entirely on her own shoulders.

The accounts of her time alone on the island mention two elements that appear consistently enough to suggest they represent something the people who heard her story found most striking: her religious practice, and her continued use of the gun to kill animals.

She prayed.

She read the Bible she had been given.

For a Catholic of her time and background, religious practice was not a coping mechanism in the modern therapeutic sense — it was the fundamental structure of meaning within which all human experience took place.

Whatever comfort the accounts say she found in her faith, it was real comfort within the framework of her worldview, and it apparently sustained her through the period of greatest isolation.