When people ask how she coped with the violent and untimely deaths that claimed both her parents, her three brothers, her husband, and two sons, she says with a smile, “Everyone takes their licks.” As she told me, “We feel like we ought to be able to write our own scripts to our lives, and sometimes we feel disappointed in God when life rewrites the plot. The key is acceptance and gratitude. We need to practice wanting what we’ve got, not what we wish we had.”
