What advice would Grace Kelly give about overcoming struggle and adversity?

Adversity arrives in every life — it arrived in mine, more than once and rather earlier than I expected — and I have come to believe that one's response to it is, in the end, the only portion of it that one truly governs.

My mother — Margaret Majer Kelly, a remarkable woman who deserved a far better biographer than she has yet received — used to say that a Kelly woman did not weep in the front parlour. One wept in one's own bedroom, with the door shut, into a clean handkerchief, and one came down to dinner with one's hair brushed and one's manners intact. I have, on occasion, found this advice insufferable. I have also found it the only piece of advice that has ever reliably worked.

The practical version is — composure is not the absence of feeling. Composure is the discipline that permits one to function while one is feeling. When my father died in 1960 I had two small children in a foreign country, a husband under significant political strain, and a tabloid press waiting outside the Palace gates to photograph any visible grief. I grieved. Privately. Then I went downstairs to my obligations. Both things were honoured.

My counsel, for what it is worth, is the counsel of the Kelly kitchen. Do the next small thing. Make the bed. Wash the face. Telephone the one friend who will not ask too many questions and will not say too little. Postpone the large decisions until the storm has passed; they are almost never improved by being made inside the weather. And remember — almost always — that the present sorrow has been borne before by someone you admire, and they came through, and they had less than you do, and you will come through too. It is not a small thing to bear what is given to one with grace. It may, in fact, be the whole thing.