To survive

How do so many people survive with their burdens of guilt and pain? Who hurt someone they loved, who can never forgive themselves for _____, who feel that they are the reason for their pain? How do they live? Is it even living? To know that it was your fault someone died, or even to think it was your fault. The man who thought he was ok to drive, he'd only had one drink, and then
WHAM. The world changes. The family members may hate him for the rest of their lives. He may hate himself, never trust himself, cut off his attachment with anyone he may hurt until....he's completely alone in the world. And why live?
I don't understand how someone in so much pain and agony and inner turmoil manages to live from day to day. I'm not saying they should all die, I'm simply marveling at the part of the human psyche that survives no matter what. Even if they lose their legs. Even if they lose their loved ones.
Even if their country takes everything away from them and tortures them, like Hitler and Stalin did to millions. How did they keep living, through all that hell? How did they keep living when they had to return to the world that continued to function without them?
How can all of us carry around our baggage of hurt and sadness and anger, pain, self-loathing, the things we can never tell anyone, the things we can't even put into words, though the phantoms of thought hover over all we do....how can we still live and breathe and even create the beauty that is life at its best?
We pour ourselves into work, or sports, or a bottle, trying to find the thing that will keep us alive, keep us going, let us survive one more day. Anything to distract us from those memories, those thoughts, those vultures circling above our heads, waiting for us to give in.
Maybe simply by trying, we are alive.