If I am to take any solace from the troubles in Northern Ireland and the perplexing answers my own parents gave me, it is that — on occasion and sometimes against all expectations — a certain amount of endurance brings about a possibility of hope.

The questions about Northern Ireland are different this week. Today, the 108-member Assembly is scheduled to enter a historic power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party. In the past, the two parties sat at the province’s most distant extremes. The Democratic Unionist leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, once said that he would be ready for talks only “when you marry Christ to Beelzebub.” So what happened? Did he and Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams just grow up? Were they able to understand the terror of fathers and grandfathers — that our children might one day become as bad, or as conflicted, or as confused, as us? Is today’s swearing-in ceremony the final, inevitable triumph of reason over hatred?

Hardly. The victories of peace aren’t as immediate as those of war. It is difficult to imagine the members of the Assembly’s opposing parties shaking hands and agreeing on the colors of the flowers for the Easter parade. It will be a long, rocky road. Parts of the North are still separated by 50-foot-high “peace” walls. More than 90 percent of public housing is segregated, and research has shown that even 3-year-olds still display sectarian instincts. But in the aftermath of so many decades of violence, children are out in East Belfast scrubbing the walls free of political graffiti. Fierce enemies are shaking hands. Prisons, like the infamous H-Block, have been torn down.

There is no greater moment in war than the end of it. The vague dream of getting older, for politicians and terrorists and even children, is that we can somehow still become better people. As much as anything, the move toward devolution is a glimmer of hope for the rest of the world — if it can happen in Northern Ireland, it’s possible that it can happen anywhere. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Iraq.

One of the reasons that center holds is that no one politician, or party, or popular figure is trying to own the peace. It is an international agreement that owes as much to the vision of political leaders as it does to the thousands of mothers and fathers who have brokered it from the inside.

The questions of this generation of children are yet to be shaped. With luck and vision, the “Why?” will be said with a bewildered look backward rather than with a horrified glance about.

For a nation that has shouldered so much for so long, the possibility of no more needless small white coffins is almost answer enough.