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trumpet and guns were fired in the traditional salute. I covered my ears at the noise. As I watched my dad’s coffin lowered slowly into the ground and out of sight, I felt empty inside. That feeling would never fully go away. The men folded the American flag that had been draped over my dad’s coffin into a perfect triangle and handed it to my mother.
    The flag stayed folded for the next thirteen years.

TRAGEDY PRECEDES SUCCESS
    My great-grandmother always said, “God knows what he’s doing, even when you don’t.” I agree with her. There is nothing in my life that I would go back and change, even the darkest moments. All the successes and greatest joys in my life are a result of the absolute worst things. Every missed opportunity is a blessing in disguise.
    A loss leads to a victory. Being fired leads to a dream job. Death leads to a birth. I find comfort in believing that good things can grow out of tragedy. 
    The first few months after my dad died, I’d wake up and be surprised that the sun was still rising in the east; that people were still playing and going to school. Nothing seemed to have changed.
    I did the best I could just to keep going. Sometimes, it felt like Dad wasn’t home from work yet. Like he would walk through the door any minute, snowflakes on his mustache, and bellow, “It is colder than a witch’s titty out there.”
    Other times, his absence was overwhelming. The sucker punch of stumbling across a half-chewed pack of his Wrigley’s spearmint gum lodged in the couch cushions or a receipt with his signature buried in a pile of papers.
    But after a while, him not being there started to seem normal. I still missed my dad. I still thought about him every day—I still think about him every day—but I knew not to expect him to walk through the door.
    The second winter after my dad died, my mom started dating again. She met Dennis online. Dennis was a rocket scientist. (If you bring that up to him, he will say he wasn’t actually a rocket scientist, but that he worked on the radar that was used with rockets—because clearly that’s a big difference.) Dennis sent my mom a pink fractal for Valentine’s Day. My mom was flattered. I didn’t even know what a fractal was.
    A few months later, Dennis asked my mom to marry him. My mom was really happy, and it made me happy. We moved back to California and in March 1998, just after my eleventh birthday, my sister Julia was born.
    When we moved to Santa Monica, my mom reconnected with some of her old judo buddies in the Los Angeles area. They were guys she had trained with back in the day when she was on the world team. She was the first American to win the world judo championships, but that had been before I was born. Now, one of those friends had started his own club and invited my mom to work out there. One day, I just asked if I could go try it out.
    The next Wednesday afternoon, I hopped in the car to head to judo. I didn’t expect it to be a life-changing moment.
    My dad’s death set off a series of events that would not have occurred had he lived. We wouldn’t have moved back to California. I wouldn’t have a younger sister. I wouldn’t have taken up judo. Who knows what I would be doing or how my life would have ended up.
    But I wouldn’t have ended up here.

DO NOT ACCEPT LESS THAN WHAT YOU’RE CAPABLE OF
    My sister Jennifer says we grew up in a family where exceptional was considered average. If you got a report card with all A’s and an A-minus, my mom would ask why you didn’t get all A’s. If I won a tournament, my mom would ask why I didn’t win it by all ippons, judo’s version of a knockout. She never expected more from us than we were capable of, but she never accepted less.
    The very first time I stepped on the judo mat I fell in love with the sport. I was amazed by how complex judo was. How creative you had to be. There