Divorce, suicide, sexual addiction, child custody case, alcohol abuse, estranged siblings, stillbirth, murder, dementia, autism, food addiction, breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart attack, opioid allergy, etc. Shall I go on? This is just a cursory perusal of some of the issues faced in my extended family.

Does it sound like the back story to a new soap opera (if they even still have those these days)?

I know that as one gets older it seems there are more funerals to attend, more hospitals to visit, more doctors to know, more support groups to attend, less energy, less memory, less . . . .

And it doesn’t seem adequate to just say, “Well, that’s life!”

But there you have it! The vision of life most of us have as we grow up DOES NOT INCLUDE much of what I’ve listed above. These unexpected arrivals are the “Cousin Eddies” of life that come to visit for extended periods of time, and some never leave. They are pock-marks on our otherwise flawless and dreamlike mirages of life.

The truth is these unsatisfactory realities come busting into our pristine showroom of existence and start turning over highly decorated tables, leaving us with enormous messes to clean up and often without any tools to do so.

But we forge ahead, don’t we? Somehow. It’s as if we’ve been made to face our situational/relational foes after a bit of disappointment and depression, get up again, and move on. Oh yes, we may retain some scars, nurse some hurts, and in some cases . . . recover for a lifetime. But we keep living.

I wonder if my extended family is all that different from yours. I suspect not. Life demands resilience. Our love affair with perfection, comfort and ease, success without failure, and joy without pain will come to an end at some point if we live long enough. Then life gets defined in a wholly different way.

And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it is necessary. Resilience, the ability to “spring back,” only exists when one has been downed by some circumstance or decision; it only has meaning if defeat, disappointment or failure are present. Weight-lifters know this phenomenon well; they purposely work the muscle they’re growing to the point of failure so that it can be stronger.

The refining process is often something we’d rather do without. But we can’t, can we?

My father lost his own father as a young man, learned to cope with a broken relationship with his older brother, endured vein stripping due to thrombophlebitis, lost a kidney to cancer, lived with employment beneath his skill level, moved his wife and two sons 1,500 miles away from family and friends due to respiratory struggles, kicked a long standing nicotine addiction, and I witnessed as he decided not to do dialysis on his one remaining kidney and chose to face death which occurred three months after his final diagnosis.

My mother suffered from back troubles all during her adult life, lost her father and mother while she was in her thirties, stood by my father’s side as he moved her away from her family and friends, went to work to bring more income into the family, had to bury her husband and move back across the country after his death, suffered from pulmonary problems and had to go through a back surgery from which she never fully recovered, entered assisting living and was dead 25 days later.

When you make the mistake of listing all the maladies one endures in life it can be daunting. But I can tell you this: my father died, lying in his hospice bed, after a day of singing old hymns he loved and enjoying his supper; in my mind’s eye I can see the smile that was on his face.

And my mother, fully aware of what was to come, lay peacefully resting in her hospice bed until shortly after midnight, surrounded by two angelic nurses who read hymns to her, she awoke briefly and they asked her if she needed anything. She said, “No.” Then took her last breath. I saw her not one hour later. At peace.

One cannot measure the success of a life by listing its maladies. One cannot measure the success of a family by listing its failures. And the goodness of life is not present only in the spaces between maladies; it embraces them, too.

If I live till November this year I will be 70. That gives me pause. I almost died a month before my 63rd birthday, so . . . I know it can happen. And will. I could list all the things I’ve endured, of course, and try to impress you with how tenacious I am. But I know the truth.

I am as fortunate as they come.

I am learning to take the good with the bad. And so must you. Our “stories” would not be worth reading, nor would they warrant a retelling if there were not a mixture of success and failure, elation and defeat. It is within the very nature of this world to kill. And it is within our very own human nature to survive.

Your personal story is what happens in between those two warring natures: where you (or someone you love) overcame the addiction; where you . . . endured that defeat; where you . . . faced that Giant of disappointment; where you . . . loved in spite of rejection.