Two weeks after an ALS diagnosis forced him out of baseball, Lou Gehrig stood at home plate in Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, in front of 61,808 fans. He had every reason to talk about his bad break, but instead he spent the speech thanking people: the fans, his teammates, his managers, the groundskeepers, his parents, his wife, and even his mother-in-law. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” he said, closing with the words that he might have been given a bad break, but he had an awful lot to live for. Gehrig died less than two years later, at 37, but that day he showed the whole country that gratitude can stand up tall in the middle of a storm.
