Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. —John Lennon

I’ve spent most of my life making the best of things. I’m a confessed control freak who has a bag full of alternative plans. Experience has taught me that reaching the endpoint of my original goals has almost always been interrupted by tragedies and surprises that changed the entire focus of my efforts. I’ve learned to be ready for the unexpected moments even as I am rarely able to predict exactly what will happen from one moment to the next. I suppose that after a lifetime when a best laid plan after another went astray I almost expect the pathway of my life to be serpentine rather than straight and narrow. 

I suppose that each of us has experienced the shocking moment when everything changes, some in more brutal ways than others. We don’t expect an evening at a baseball game to end in the murder of a loved one, but I have an acquaintance who endured that horror. We fear a medical diagnosis that by definition will shorten our lives because we witness people hearing such fateful words. We are never really ready for loss or pain that seems to come from nowhere even if we have led cautious and predictable lives. As the song says life happens when we least expect it. 

I never imagined losing my father at the age of eight. I assumed he would be around for years to come. I thought that he and I would share all of my milestones and I hoped that I would make him proud of me. I suspect that he already knew that I was going to be okay and that I would not have to prove myself to him. His love was apparent to me. I’ve carried it tucked away in my memories since nineteen fifty seven. 

My mother’s descent into the depression and mania of her bipolar disorder was shocking to me. At a time when I was only beginning my life with my new husband I was not ready to become her advocate and sometimes caretaker. I was frightened and even admittedly a bit resentful of having to dedicate a portion of my energy to protecting and caring for her. I had to remind myself of the sacrifices she had made for me and my brothers as a very young widow whose own dreams had been swept away in an instant. 

Over the years I have witnessed great suffering and almost impossible challenges that friends and family members have endured. I have seen the hardships of many of my students. I have watched the unfolding of life that breaks hearts and forces painful decisions, but I have also smiled at the happiness that often counter balances the most difficult times. Somehow we humans are quite adept at making lemonade out of lemons. 

I have often been fascinated by the human ability to rise from the ashes like a magical phoenix. I watched my Aunt Claudia lose her incredible husband when she was only in her twenties. Sixteen years later the daughter that the two of them had created also shockingly died. My aunt’s pain was unimaginable to me and yet she found the courage to just keep moving forward. She remained a happy soul in spite of the trials that seemed to come her way with uncanny regularity. 

My husband laughs at my tendency to make promises with the addition of the phrase, “God willing.” I learned long ago that nothing is guaranteed. In spite of my realization that we don’t always get what we want, I do believe that we humans have our ways of dealing with all of the vagaries of life with surprising resilience. It may take time to adjust to our new realities, but in most situations we somehow manage, albeit a bit more dented than we once were. 

I speak of my father often as though he died only a short time ago. In a pensive moment my husband wondered aloud if he and I would ever have met had my father lived into a ripe old age rather than leaving his family as a young man. Of course we can never predict what might have happened. Those “what ifs’ are so hypothetical. Still, I feel certain that somehow my husband and I were meant to be together and that we would have found each other perhaps in a different way. 

I am the sum total of all of my days. Each moment has shaped me into the person that I am. Both my tragedies and my triumphs have affected how I face the world. So it is with each of us. We are very much alike in that each of us will face challenges that seem to arise when we are busy making other plans. Sometimes the unexpected is glorious and other times it feels as though it has defeated us. That is the conundrum that we all share. Our stories shape us but we have the power to make certain that they do not define us as we keep moving down the road.