According to former MLB pitcher Vernon Law, “Experience is a cruel teacher. She gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” My neighbor quoted Law the other day in regard to the lessons she learned caring for her father. If she’d only known then what she knows now as a result of her experience, she said, the journey might have been better for both her dad and herself. This rang in my ears as I recalled a conversation I had with a woman named Mary over the holidays. This strong, stubborn Irish woman, who had lived through many challenges in her life without so much as a tear, was in front of me sobbing. “I never thought I would end up this way,” she said. “What way?” I asked. She recounted how she’d worked since she was a young teen and saved money with her sister to come to America. Once in the United States, she married and raised three boys. She and her husband put the boys through Catholic school, then college, then graduate school for two of them. But in her later years...