If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble. ~ Moliere

Yes, it's complicated. He's complicated. As complicated as it is, it's even more complicated than that.

It is about vengeance and justice. It's about the mission. It's about preventing other children from losing their parents like he did.

But, it isn't only about vengeance and justice. It isn't simply about having a mission to prevent other children from losing parents in the most violent of circumstances. Yes, it is about those things. But it isn't just about those things.

The experts will tell you that children can react to the death of a loved one in a variety of ways. There could be denial, anxiety, panic, sleeplessness, hostility, and guilt. To name just a few.

In the usual course of grieving the loss of someone they love, children typically go through a process that first involves the experience of the pain and acceptance of the loss. The acceptance eventually allows children to become able to reminisce and remember the person who died. This process preserves positive memories and integrates some of them into the child's own concept of himself.

In the healthy resolution of the normal grieving process, the child then becomes better able to reinvest in new relationships.

It is a much more difficult process for children whose loved ones die under sudden, horrifying, frightening circumstances – called traumatic grief. For these children, the normal grieving process can be disrupted. The child may become "stuck" on the way the person died.

The child may continue to experience and relive a combination of trauma and grief so severe that any thoughts or reminders about the person ―even happy ones―can lead back to frightening thoughts and memories of their death. Accompanied by terrifying nightmares, incapacitating guilt, frightening hostility, overwhelming helplessness…

Thinking about their lost loved ones may not evolve into the positive and comforting memories hoped for as part of the grieving process. Instead those thoughts can continue to be hurtful, upsetting and even terrifying. The child may well avoid thinking or talking about the person who died altogether.

In the unusual circumstance that the child is also in possession of unyielding guilt, limitless intellectual capacity, indomitable will, and endless material resources – there could also be the means by which to eventually engage in the most extreme of activities that would allow for incessant attempts to take back that lost control in childhood.

Reliving the traumatic event over and over again would then become deliberate – an attempt to find absolution by altering the outcome.