Live and learn.

I was watching So You Think You Can Dance the other night, because uh, see last week's post about TV.

Anyway, there was this one guy with a total hard luck story. His mom was a drug addict and he was born addicted. He grew up in a tough neighborhood full of gang members and prostitutes. His mother couldn't take care of him so his aunt raised him. He was hoping dance would be his escape route from poverty.

Sad story. And yet . . . something about it rubbed me the wrong way.

Fast forward toward the end of the show and a cute young blonde girl about to take the stage. Turns out she had just found out the day before on the drive down to the audition that her grandfather passed away. She danced anyway. She danced her little her heart out, and if it wasn't the most elegant dance of the night, it was certainly the most heartfelt. Her face shone and she said something about she had always liked the words to her song, but now they told a story. She cried, because who wouldn't, but it wasn't self-pitying. She set her chin in determination, and with a smile, said she figured her grandfather had really just tried to guarantee himself a front row seat.

She gripped me in the way the guy with the earlier sad story didn't. I thought about it for a while and then I figured it out. The first case was a guy who was defined by his tragedy. The second case, the girl, was defined by her reaction to her tragedy.

I thought about it again when I was flipping through pictures in my Facebook album and I ran across this one from our last family reunion three years ago:

See that grumpy looking guy in the middle in the white shirt? The one I'm standing behind? That's my Pawpaw. He laughed all the time but he rarely smiled for pictures. To his left in dark green is my dad. Above him to my left is my mom. I'm surrounded on three sides by some of the dearest people in my life in this picture.

In six months, all three of them were dead. We didn't know this picture would be two months before my dad's first episode of respiratory failure. Or that a week after that we would find out that my mom's breast cancer had returned after four years and it was stage four. We didn't know that my dad would die six weeks before my wedding or that my mom would die a month after that. Or that my Pawpaw would die of a completely unexpected heart attack the day after that.

For the first year, I won't lie: it really did define me. I was the girl who'd become an orphan at 32. I was the girl who had buried her father, gotten married, and buried her mother and favorite grandfather in less than three months. I almost couldn't keep from spewing it out to everyone who said, "Hello."

But now . . . I think it's become more about how I've moved past that.

No, that's not right. Those experiences are a permanent part of me. But they're not an anchor holding me back. They're just part of the fabric of me, something that I've woven in over time.

I'm thankful I know how to do that. Do you want to know who taught me that?

The cute man in the middle. And his son to his left. And the pretty lady just above him.