How I Found My Super Power Against Adversity
Grit, Grace, and DNA, Part 7
The year: 2026
The place: The Cardiac Unit in Twin Falls, Idaho
Subject: Kyla Merwin (1959—)
I take things hard.
Not selectively. Not proportionally. Everything lands with a thud and sticks.
The good, I can barely contain. The bad? It lingers like a nasty head cold.
A silver thimble, the smell of chicken broth, the slap of water against a boat … the dead and the gone and the losses are thinly veiled … only a blink of memory away.
I do not live in a world with shades of gray.
Which is how I ended up in the cardiac unit in Twin Falls, Idaho.
My family line is rife with heart disease. My mother and father both had it. My brother, a model for senior heath – running marathons into his fifties – had it.
But it wasn’t clogged arteries that did me in. According to the handsome, fit cardiologist, there isn’t a fleck of plaque to be found in there. He said, “I’d be doing a back flip if I had your arteries.”
Which is unfair to everyone else in my lineage, since I’ve spent a good deal of my life eating junk food and drinking wine.
Life isn’t fair, of course. But in the end, I like to believe it’s balanced.
My heart attack was perpetrated by unmanaged stress. My cortisol needs a governor. My adrenaline an overflow valve.
In the same episode, my gallbladder joined the party, spewing out bile (sorry), and excessive acid in my stomach spawned a peptic ulcer.
As I mentioned, everything lands with a thud. And sticks.
Which is how I ended up in the cardiac unit in Twin Falls, Idaho—not from clogged arteries, but from a lifetime of feeling everything all the way through.
Apparently, my arteries are pristine. My stress response, less so.
So, I spent five miserable days in a hospital bed a hundred miles from home—alone, scared, in pain. Add to that, the entire hospital ran out of Diet Coke. Which felt personal.
Anyone who really know me knows that I run my life of Diet Coke and optimism.
That’s my super power: An endless force of optimism.
Because here’s the thing: I don’t always bounce right away.
I spiral. I stew. I replay every mistake I’ve ever made.
But sooner or later – usually somewhere between self-pity and the junk food isle – something shifts. It always does.
I get up. I make a plan. I move forward.
“Butter side up” isn’t how I land. It’s where I end up. And maybe that’s the inheritance.
Not just the sensitive heart that feels everything too deeply, but the quiet, stubborn refusal to stay down.
“Butter side up” isn’t how I land. It’s where I end up — after the fall, after the mess, after I’ve put myself back together.
When the rough edges of life, or my own mistakes, knock me down, I don’t rely on an incomprehensible act of Grace to help me rise bravely, stronger, and with more compassion.
Nor am I required to suffer helplessly at the whim of circumstance.
Happy expectations give me the fire and the confidence I need to navigate whatever life kicks into my path.
Now that I think about it, maybe that endless force of optimism that puts me back together is Grace.
Okay, let’s go with that.
If you take anything from this story, I hope it’s what I’ve taken from it, which is this:
Whatever your super power is, you’ve had it your whole life.
It’s in there and you can name it. It’s quiet, persistent, and reliable. And no power on earth, no person, can ever take it away from you.
Because it comes to you, unbidden, from Grace.
Butter side up. Eventually.
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Epilogue
And there you have it. Seven stories of grit, grace, and DNA.
When I look back across these stories, I see more than the people who came before me. I see the traits they carried – grit, imagination, moxie, courage – moving quietly through time as they found their way to me.
They offer proof that we come from people who endured, improvised, loved imperfectly, and carried on.
What I know now is this: We don’t get to choose what’s handed down to us—only what we do with it.
So I take the useful parts. I soften the sharp edges where I can. And I carry the rest with a little more awareness than I used to.
That’s the work. That’s the inheritance. We fall. We learn. We persevere.
We keep landing butter side up.
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Read Part 1, “I Inherited Courage: How Lon and Cecilia Threw Themselves from a Moving Train.”
Read Part 2, “I Inherited Gumption: How Pearly Jack Merwin Walked North into Canada and Disappeared.”
Read Part 3, “I Inherited Tenacity: How Aunt Toots Fended Off the Oil Men.”
Read Part 4, “I Inherited Imagination: How Gramma Built a Woodland Retreat from a Firecracker Shack.”
Read Part 5, “I Inherited Moxie: How Dad Smoked His Last Cigarette While Driving to the Emergency Room.”
Read Part 6, “I Inherited Guts: How My Brother Saved Me from a Careening Train.”
Kyla Merwin 