Resilience

Ever needed an excuse to quit? To give up? Some people just won’t. And their tenacity and
sheer resolve provides leadership through inspiration. What would you do? What would have
become of you if… 

Your father went out for a pack of smokes and never came back right after you were born, leaving you in the care of your siblings and a mother severely disabled by rheumatoid arthritis — without alimony, without child support and without health care and only welfare to live on?

At age six, you got a case of measles that not only made itchy, but burned out the nerve
endings in your ears so that you lost most of your hearing? At an age when most kids were
socializing and expanding their vocabulary, you couldn’t hear the words well enough to
enunciate them properly. At the age when kids may just be their most cruel, you had a speech
impediment to provide a constant source of mockery and ridicule.

By the time you were nine, you and your brother were totally responsible for taking care of your
wheelchair bound mother. You left a frustrating day at school to clean house and do laundry.
But you’re a kid and this is your life and you deal with it.

And then two years later, you’re an eleven-year-old playing third base and you catch a hard line
drive. In the face. Eleven bones broken and in the hospital for three months with your jaw
wired, you become a denture wearer while still in grade school. And oh, yeah, you need to
learn how to speak again and how to form words with your new mouth.

When you are fourteen, your brother marries and moves out. So instead of teen years of
dances and parties, you become a full-time caregiver for your mother.

Many of us would have given up by now. We could become angry and let that anger direct our
lives. We could become discouraged and depressed and allow the state or some agency care
for us. But the boy that I’m writing about didn’t do that. He went to school and came home and
cared for his mom and repeated that and, as life would have it, some good things did happen.

At fourteen, he became friends with a girl who lived on his paper route. It was a friendship that
would endure. As a sophomore in high school, a caring Spanish teacher figured out that there
might be a reason why this student’s performance dropped when the curriculum changed from
book based to conversational based. The teacher had the boy’s hearing tested and after all of
these years, he was finally diagnosed for the hearing loss. Hearing aid technology at this time
only raised volume and didn’t really do much to help him hear, but the intervention resulted in
speech therapy and an advocate who helped him attend a college in his hometown so that he
could continue to take care of his mother.

After college, he married the girl he befriended ten years earlier and it is a partnership that
continued for the rest of his life. He credited the love, support, guidance and wisdom of his
lifetime friend and partner, Joyce as the reason for his indomitable spirit and persistence.
Despite his hearing loss and speech impediments, Stan Breckenridge MAS went on to be an
industry advocate, speaker and leader. When the company he was leading was destroyed by
fire, he led the rebuilding. He gave countless education seminars and wrote the legislation that
was adopted as the Drug Modernization Act of 1997. And in 2008, he served as the chairman of
the board of directors of PPAI.

I’ve been writing and presenting a lot during this pandemic about the importance of resilience
and the spirit of turning setbacks into stepping stones. Five years ago, Stan passed away on
October 21, 2015. Two days prior, he had called me mourning the passing of that Spanish
teacher who’s acts of kindness and caring had so impacted his life.
Stan’s life continues to provide inspiration to all of us and a strong reminder that we may not be
able to control life’s circumstances, but we do have full control over our attitude.

When life knocks you down, don’t ever stop getting back up.