I sat down with Ken and Mary Sue Grein knowing their story would be heavy. I didn't expect it to steady me the way it did.

They were just 22 years old when their son Jacob was born with severe medical complications. Within days, doctors told them he wouldn't live long and encouraged them to let him die. Ken and Mary Sue refused. They chose life, even though no one could tell them what that life would require.

Jacob lived 37 years.

In our conversation, they speak candidly about what those decades held: long hospital stays, countless surgeries, daily caregiving, isolation, anger, and exhaustion. They don't sanitize any of it. But they also don't frame Jacob's life as a tragedy. What comes through instead is clarity, gratitude, and a hard-won conviction that a difficult life does not have to be a bad one.

They talk about how caregiving reshaped their marriage, formed their other children, and rewired their own hearts. Disability didn't fracture their family. It refined it. Their children grew up compassionate, responsible, and unafraid of suffering. Jacob himself, despite profound limitations, lived with joy, affection, and gratitude, fully present in the life of his family.

As a longtime caregiver myself, much of what they shared felt familiar: the loneliness, the way support fades, the daily choice between bitterness and gratitude. But what stayed with me most was their quiet insistence that every life is worth living, even when it arrives wrapped in fear, limitation, and unanswered questions.

This is not a conversation about pretending suffering is good. It's about refusing to let suffering be the final word. Ken and Mary Sue didn't just care for their son. They learned how to live faithfully in the middle of what could not be fixed, and that is a lesson every caregiver needs.

___________________

A Caregiver's Companion - Scriptures, Hymns, and Forty Years of Insights for Life's Toughest Role