Based on my personal and meagre experience, part of what we call "the indomitable human spirit" rests on the ability humans have to turn negatives into positives, failures into learning experiences ; setbacks are temporary, we tell ourselves, they allow us to grow, you fall so you can get up ; along with all the self improvement material any person older than six and who has been outside can produce.
It's easy to understand why. Nobody likes to fail, yet it inevitably happens sooner or later, and then nobody likes to have failed and to be at this stage of life, you have to move on, find the positive, you've made this and that mistake so that you may avoid making it at a later, more important stage in life ; it's all a big rehearsal for the moment that eventually comes that will actually matter, one might even think if they are delusional enough.
Of course, the boring truth is that mistakes, setbacks that have happened are just that. They could have been avoided, they can and often do totally prepare you better for the rest of your life, but there is no rehearsal. Life, what you've made of it so far and what's to come is all you get.
Still, our psyche attempts to rationalize failures, incorporate them into a greater plan for life because negative feelings, negative consequences can be heavy to live with. Most of the time, this coping mechanism comes in easy. There is always more to come, more occasions to learn and grow and perform better the next time, become a better version of yourself. Until, of course, the time where there isn't.
If you've been alive long enough, you know grief. Losing a loved one is a catastrophically bad ordeal for all the obvious reasons, one of them being the absolute aspect of death. There is never any positive to loss. There is no greater conclusion, no lesson to be taken from it, no way to turn a bad situation into a mitigated one. It's simply bad, absolutely bad. All you can do is cry all you have, lament yourself, make yourself sadder until you've ousted all you had bottled in straight to the outside. It's how it's supposed to work. In the end, slowly, you accept, and you move on with your life bearing an additional weight on your shoulders and the duty to remember those you've loved and who've loved you back.
You do not self improve from loss and death, you abide, wearing as your pride the only unalienable tool we, as a species, possess: the love we have for our own, the love we receive from our own.
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