Some cope; some don't.

My sister said this to me when she was 16 years old and married to a guy who worked in a gas station and was pregnant. By the time she was 20, she'd had three kids. At 44, she was dead.


(Just to get it out of the way, cause of death was hypothermia: she went to sleep in her bedroom with the windows wide open, in winter, in Dallas, Texas, after her husband had left her, taking their three children. The authorities said she had a heart condition.)


In his defense, her husband was a very honorable guy who didn't realize who he was marrying and what the consequences would be. He was 18 at the time, from a small town in Oklahoma. I'm sure he saw her at a local drive-in and was smitten. She was very pretty.


So far as I know -- and we're out of touch these days -- all those kids are still alive, but I have no idea who they are or how they turned out. I hope they're all happy, but I doubt it.


He coped; she didn't.


My sister Nancy was right about what she said, but I'm not sure she knew that it would apply to her. I think she was thinking of women in the many novels she read, who left their husbands or stayed married and, in either case, committed suicide. Unhappy women. Role models for a less than happy life.


Later, when I was a grad student in English, I encountered the poems of Sylvia Plath and ended up writing about her. She was as smart as anyone can be and wrote poems that are astonishing in their word choice and phrasing, etc., but she, like my sister, had something missing -- a gear? a perspective? a what? She put her head in an unlit oven when she was barely 30 and turned the gas on. Her husband had been screwing around on her. The woman he left her for ended up killing herself, too, and taking their child with her. (He had a way with women, no?)


(To her credit, Sylvia pushed towels into the doorway to her children's bedroom so that they were spared. They're both grown now and apparently doing okay.)

So some cope, and some don't. What does that mean?


I think it means that some of us, from birth, and for no reason that we can ascertain, are given certain genes and/or abilities that let us keep going when others would give up. We can't tell until we're tested. Who knows which of us will fold and which of us will dig down deep and find what it takes to take the next step, to move on?


Think of people you've known who have gone through horrific personal and family tragedies and have come through remarkably well, while others, faced with the same traumas, have come all undone, reduced to weeping and, eventually, making themselves sort of a nuisance. (At some point, we want to say: Get hold of yourself. Move on. Buck up. And of course we feel guilty for thinking it.)

I saw it in Viet Nam: big, strong boys collapsing into tears, while others, lesser specimens of the male gender, doing heroic deeds, even risking their lives. I saw an ex-athlete paralyzed by fear and saw a grade school English teacher, drafted against his will, run up to an enemy foxhole that held a machine gun that was keeping us all pinned down and throw a grenade in.

Go figure, huh?

It's very convenient to say that people like my sister or Sylvia or whoever you know with seemingly endless problems is just suffering from "depression"-- our latest "buzz word" -- meaning that life has gotten him or her down, and if they'd lived in a different time, they would have been just fine because now we have drugs to fix those problems. But I think that's just a convenient way of putting these people in a certain category -- depressed -- and pushing their problems under the carpet, so to speak. Yes, some of them could have been helped, but a good many of them may just not have been equipped from the beginning to cope with what life threw at them, or maybe their early lives may have so damaged them that they couldn't cope later on.

There seems to be an in-born resilience, a forging-ahead mentality, that some of us have and others of us don't. I think that certain people are equipped from the onset with the ability to deal with catastrophes and horrible losses and setbacks and betrayals, and some aren't.

And there's no judgment to be passed: it's just the way it is.

I don't think my sister or Sylvia could have done anything but what they did. That's who they were and how they were programmed. No blame should be attributed to their parents or their spouses. No one could see anything terrible coming, and no one could do anything to change the outcome. Some of us are just doomed. We have early death written all over us from an early age.

We don't all come into this world the same, as blank slates, ready to be whoever we were meant to be. Some of us arrive with mental problems or in circumstances -- poverty, abuse, etc. -- that limit our possibilities. Others are born to privilege, with a BMW to drive when they're barely sixteen and a good life all planned out. But some of the former succeed, while some of the latter fail. What's that all about?

Humans are mysteries. Each human is a brand new mystery. We come from here, but we wind up there. We soak up the lessons and then do the opposite. We know right from wrong but act like we don't. We are so independent and then end up needing all the help we can get. I used to know where I was going, but now I don't know why I'm here. Everything has gone wrong, and I don't know how to fix it, how to make it right. I'm losing control.


At that point, some cope and some don't. Some of us, regardless of upbringing -- rich or poor -- rise to the occasion and move ahead, while some us just give up and fall into ruin. Some of us go for that better job; some of us go on welfare or move back in with the parents. Psychology, for all its insights and benefits, is at a loss to predict which will do which.


Maybe the answer is drugs. I know lots of smart people on anti-depression medicine. But I suspect the answer lies deeper, within us all. I suspect some of us are just born with a survival instinct that keeps us going when things are looking their bleakest and that some of us don't have it. But surely there's a way to track that down, scientifically, and gene-splice it into all the future generations of us, right? That indomitable will to live?


Let's just hope so, for ourselves and our children and grand-children and all their children and grand-children. And let's hope it's soon. Too late for Nancy and Sylvia, and for so many others, but maybe not too late for our eternally hopeful but sure-to-be troubled descendants.

Maybe more will cope than don't.