If I’ve learned nothing else, I cannot always be happy. Life, for me is a balance of fear, love, joy, hope, and sadness. I see life as a rich menu. I  know I can feel joy. I also know now that I cannot always be satisfied or have nothing in my life but happiness. And I don’t want to.

I wish I had learned this earlier in my life; it would have spared me some pain and worry.

But I’m grateful to know it now; this is one of the things I love about growing older. I have become more sensitive, not less aware, more realistic, not more disappointed, and more content with the ebb and flow of life. When I thought I was supposed to be happy all the time, I crashed often and felt like a failure.

Something, I thought, must be wrong with me.

Pain teaches me more than anything in life. It also makes me appreciate joy.

I spent much of my life searching for the impossible, only to find real happiness when I stopped trying to tell life what to do and let life be itself.

I have accepted that with grace and gratitude. I am respectful of joy and pain. Both are essential elements of what it means to be human.

My Aunt Fannie knew this; she was one of those hydrant-built old country battle wagons who suffered no fools and learned that there are some things in life – and some people – who just cannot be fixed by prayer and wishful thinking.

To expect to be happy all the time is, ironically, a guarantee of unhappiness much of the time.

If you had a pimple or a wart on your face, Fanny would be the one to shout across the room — “You look terrible; you have a big pimple on your face!” She terrorized Joe, her hapless husband, for being a lazy and passive failure.

When her son Jerrie got divorced, he complained bitterly to everyone in the family that he was miserable,  angry, and broke. I remember Fanny looking him in the eye with one of her death-defying stares and saying: “You have food and a roof over your head, and you can pay your bills. What? Do you want to be happy TOO?”

This was incomprehensible to her, a refugee who was grateful to be alive. Happiness was for rich people. Survival was for everybody else. (I don’t think many rich people are too happy.)

If you grew up in this country in the past generation or two, you were probably spoiled in one way or another by the prosperity, shared purpose, and comfortable middle-class existence available to almost everyone willing to work.

My family never had much money, but we always had two cards, a vacation on Cape Cod in the summer, and plenty of food to eat.

We never worried about money. There was always enough.

Nobody ever thought about health care, and if you told Fanny you should have at least one or two million dollars in the bank when you retired, she would have thought you insane.

It wasn’t about happiness; it was about survival. That’s the reality of much of the world. That’s why almost everyone wants to come here. When people in our country are unhappy, they tend to blame the government, whose job now is to make us happy even though it mostly makes us miserable.

In her famous essay on refugees, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote eloquently about the experience of being a refugee: “Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are helpful in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, and the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos, and our best friends were killed in concentration camps, which meant the rupture of our private lives.

These words are as accurate now for refugees as they were when she wrote them.

I notice the same streak in the refugee children and families I have worked with for six or seven years. I’ve met scores of refugees and met their children. These people have suffered every horror and indignity life can put in their way – genocide, torture, poverty, terror, hunger, dislocation, and death.

They have helped me to understand and appreciate what is important in my life and what isn’t.

They lose everything – their good jobs, money, family, and homes – to get to America and find poverty and hardship, and hatred that they never imagined existed in America. But they soldier on.

They spend the rest of their working lives cleaning hotel rooms and Wal-Mart stores and taking busses so that their children can have better lives, and their children, most of home, have spent most of their early years in refugee camps. There are no retirement plans in their future. Their sons and daughters tell me they will help; they owe their parents much.

They have lost everything of value and, in a sense, their identity and humanity.

They accept their reality; they bear down and start again, sacrificing everything they worked for to give their children the good lives they lost. “I don’t expect to be happy,” one former doctor from Myanmar told me, “I hope to pay for heat in the winter so my children won’t be cold.”

I’ve never heard one of them talk about wanting to be happy or even being unhappy; I shudder to think of the toll becoming a refugee has taken on them, even as they enter a country that no longer seems to want them or care about them. In our country, we blame people for being poor and suffering.

Where the refugees come from, war, cruelty, dictators, starvation, and poverty are not crises; they live as they are for billions of people. It is what they expect.

They are not shocked like Americans when trouble or tragedy strikes; they rarely talk about grievance or blame. They cannot fathom a country that allows its children to be butchered in their classrooms. But they are not stunned by murder and cruelty; they grew up with it.

When I began writing about dogs, I learned that many Americans no longer expect to suffer pain, loss, or setbacks.

People mourn for years when dogs die like they never expected it to happen. Dogs don’t live very long. What did they expect? A friend recently said that having a sick cat is the same as having a sick human child.

She said that loving an animal is just like having a human child. I was sorry to hear that; I can’t be friends with her anymore.

I lost two children years ago; I can’t bear to hear or talk about whether losing a dog is the same thing.

I can’t do it.

I will never see her again without thinking of Ben and the first Emma and how much I still mourn their loss. And how someone could demean their loss in that way. So I will not see her at all.

Pain and challenge, like aging and life, are just about happiness, although I am happier now than ever. Some hurt never heals. We lose the people we love. Life hurts at every age. Some family ruptures are never repaired. We can’t wave a want to stave off sickness and death.

I am often happy. Joy is a part of life too. So is pain. Nature, which can be cruel, can also be generous. It is not one thing or the other. I would hate a life full of nothing but joy.

The more pain and loss I experience, the more joy and meaning I seek and find. One is a part of the other. The question for me is not, “Am I happy?” But is there meaning and purpose to my life?

Purpose makes me very happy.

As I get older, I  have become aware of both the meaning and meaningless of things.

Pain and loss shape character, enrich reality and provide perspective.

Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself or blame others for my discomfort, I remember my Aunt Fanny, who got a Ph.D. in life in  Russia.

What, I have to be happy, too?