By this point in my life, I’ve lost six of the people closest to me, including my teenage daughter. Each time, I’ve had to figure out how to move forward in a world that suddenly felt unrecognizable.
I never thought of myself as particularly resilient when I was growing up. That’s not to say I thought of myself as weak, timid, or whatever the opposite of resilient is; it’s just that I never gave it any thought either way. My life, in retrospect, was fairly bump-free. Sure, my parents got divorced when I was 5, but I lived a privileged life filled with love and abundance.
The first time disaster struck was when I was 27, and my 30-year-old sister died suddenly. Nomi and I had the kind of magical relationship where we weren’t only sisters, but best friends. Her death punctured the hazy bubble I’d lived in up to that point. My world tilted and would never fully right itself again.
But was I resilient? I survived, but not with any special grace or courage. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, except on the days when my legs buckled, and all I could do was stay still.
I thought Nomi’s death would be the defining tragedy of my life. I couldn’t have imagined that it was only the beginning.
A year later, I married my college sweetheart. When it was time to start a family, we assumed we’d do so the “fun way.” That didn’t pan out. After five years and 25 medical procedures, we shifted our dream and adopted three babies from Guatemala. Those five years required the courage to stay on the roller coaster, even when the ride was nauseating. The tenacity to escalate the medical interventions with the belief that each time, the new thing would be the one to work. And ultimately, the flexibility to change our dreams.
Still, that was JV-level resilience compared to what came next.
Right as I became a mother, my own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now I had a front-row seat to true resilience. This was the same woman, after all, who’d lost her daughter and her husband within three months yet somehow found the strength to dance and sing again. Her resilience came in the form of going out for a beer after chemo, getting on hands and knees — bone pain be damned — to play with her new grandbabies, and having the courage to say no to more treatment so she could enjoy the months she had left.
Her resilience seeped into my spirit.
Three years later, my five-year-old daughter, Dalia, was diagnosed with an ultra-rare form of mitochondrial disease. The doctors didn’t know how fast it would progress, only that it was degenerative. By age nine, she lost the ability to walk, eat orally, talk, and breathe without a ventilator.
You’d think a diagnosis as devastating as Dalia’s would mean our days would be filled with sorrow and despair. But Dalia had another plan in mind. She refused to let tragedy run the show. She wanted to laugh, play, and tease her brothers. She wanted to cuddle and dance, even when all she could move were her shoulders. She wanted to bake cookies for the family, even when she could no longer eat them herself.
Her body grew weaker, but her spirit only grew stronger. Dalia carried more resilience inside her tiny frame than anyone I’d ever known.
When Dalia was twelve, my sister Rachel was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. Rachel, who was the definition of the life of the party, continued to live with largesse. She hosted celebrations, travelled, and continued working at her job, helping place people in their dream careers, until the month before she died.
So many resilient women have inspired me throughout my life – my mother, my sister, and my daughter, too. I wondered, at times, if I had a shred of the resilience they’d shown. But then I realized that I was a primary caregiver for each of them. I was their nurse, their therapist, their note-taker at every doctor’s appointment. I gave them my shoulders to lean on literally and figuratively. I laughed with them whenever I could, and I sat with them in the sadness when that was what they needed.
So maybe it wasn’t only that I was absorbing their resilience, but also that I was offering them some of mine. Resilience can be contagious that way.
Resilience is messy. It’s not about stoic strength or a “keep your chin up” mentality. It’s laughter through tears, post-chemo toasts, and standing up to tragedy with cookies and cuddles. And in the end, it isn’t something we embody independently, but something we pass back and forth – sometimes propping each other up, sometimes allowing ourselves to lean on those who are beside us. It’s less of a muscle than an embrace that forms an unbreakable circle, generation to generation, sister to sister, mother to daughter.
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