“Your mother has a little bit of cancer,” my dad told me over the phone. A little bit, he said.

My family has a fantastic talent for shading bad news in colors we think we can stand. When my sister fell down the stairs and broke her leg so badly she almost lost it, it was, “She had a tiny stopping issue that left her with just a slight hip-to-toe cast situation.” Our dog “ran away” when I was 5, and it was, “You may be seeing Sammy somewhat less than you’re used to seeing him.”

I suspect I carry that gene that reduces every bad situation down to its lowest common benignity because driving to my mother’s radiation treatments, meeting with her oncologist and sitting by her hospital bed, I was never scared. I prayed, sure. A few Hail Marys never hurt anyone, but I offered them up with more hubris than sincerity. My mother got better, and there was no one less surprised to find her vacuuming the living room a week after she got out of the hospital than me.

A few years later I had a tumor of my own and while people around me were kind enough to panic on my behalf, I only remember being annoyed. I practically skipped into surgery, completely unafraid, so sure was I of the good news awaiting me.

How badly I would like to tell you that it was courage, faith or a positive attitude that allowed me to coast through my mother’s illness and my own cancer scare until I arrived at my happy endings, but I can’t. I felt entitled. How dare cancer think it could touch my charmed life, and if it touched my family, then I would say when enough was enough. I didn’t know how big the giant I was poking was.

And then people started getting sick, the kind of sick where you don’t get any better.

People I knew, people I loved, were not living happy endings, and I didn’t know what to do about that. Cancer, that toxic interloper, was cutting swaths of destruction through families and poisoning their futures. I don’t know at what point I understood that I was entitled to exactly nothing, that the one thing I’d had going for me was dumb luck. As much as I wanted to give that luck to Bob, Terry, Scott and Pat, I couldn’t.

My prayers lost their arrogance and filled with desperation. I asked for miracles, begged for them. I didn’t care if they came from God, doctors or magic; they had to come. When they didn’t, I tried to reconcile myself to the peace that did.

Now my friend Tim is dying. Tim the cool. Tim the hippest of the hip. Quiet, strong, clever Tim. Tim the dad, husband, brother, son. Tim, my friend, is dying, and I don’t know what to do about that either.

Tim is my niece Caitlin’s father. Right about now Cait should be wondering what color to dye her hair this month, but she’s not. For the better part of a year she’s been helping take care of her dad, first at the hospital in Wisconsin where they were so full of hope, and now at home in Michigan where they are not.

Cait’s been doing a lot of things lately that make me wonder. She watches a football game with her dad and talks to him about better days. She tells me how much she enjoyed those few hours and I wonder how she finds pleasure in hours that she knows are numbered. She seems to get some comfort culling together music and pictures that celebrate a life well lived even while she helps Tim through punishing days and nights that are worse, and I wonder how she does not drown in anger.

She sleeps by his side but doesn’t rest, and when I tell her that I’m worried about her and all she has to do is say the word and I will put her on a plane to Minnesota she says, “Later. After.” When I’m sad she says she’s happy that her dad taught her to laugh. A loyal, strong young woman has come sharply into focus where a little girl once stood and I wonder what happened to the baby Tim carried around Hawaii when we all went on vacation together 23 years ago. Now she carries him, and still, I wonder when any of us will be able to think about that without tears.

Caitlin, her brothers, and step mom (whose strength and perseverance are beyond description) recently put up a Christmas tree for Tim. They try very hard to keep their home a gentle and protective place for him to live for however long he can. They make sure that when there is suffering there is also dignity and when there is pain there is the salve of kindness. This is love. This is grace. It is the grace of God and the grace of being fully human under the most inhuman circumstances. I wonder if there isn’t something miraculous about that.

I wonder if sometimes the miracles we get are not the ones we asked for.

St. Paul resident Alexandra Kloster appears on two Fridays a month. She may be reached at alikloster@yahoo.com and her blog is Radishes at Dawn at alexandrakloster.com.