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Sometimes it happens that a small incident, in retrospect, is prophetic of a significant future event.

In late 1990, my aunt was writing a letter with a pen bearing the logo of a major professional services firm in which my uncle had been a partner for 24 years. In the middle of the letter, the pen ran dry. She had no idea that this was a harbinger of bad tidings. On that very day, his firm declared bankruptcy. It was the seventh largest such company in the United States, with offices in 50 cities and international affiliates.

My aunt never replaced the empty cartridge in that pen. It will forever remain a symbol of the financial disaster that befell the firm's 350 partners and 115 retired partners, as well as 3,500 employees nationwide. Many of those people had no knowledge of the bankruptcy filing until it was announced in the New York Times.

Employees scrambled to find jobs. Twenty years ago, times were better than they are now.

Partners were devastated. The retired ones were already living on their pensions -- pensions that were funded out of future earnings. If there is no firm to earn money, there are no pensions. Active partners lost future pensions and jobs, as well as medical and life insurance. As partners, they lost their capital investments in the firm -- what he or she put in when they "made it."

The kicker was that the firm had been the target of malpractice suits that destroyed it. The debts of the firm became the responsibility of the partners personally. Under partnership law, everything they owned was on the hook.

My aunt felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her life. She remembers feeling afraid to get sick, afraid to go for a medical test, because they had no medical insurance. It took months for the bankruptcy court to make its decisions. She wrote an anonymous personal letter to the bankruptcy judge, begging him not to take away her home. Fortunately, they got to keep their home, but a good part of their life savings was taken by the court.

What do we do now, they wondered? Two years before retirement, everything they'd built for a lifetime went down the tube. They sold the home and downsized. He got a job at a lower salary and she worked part-time. New medical insurance came with his new job. After several years, they retired with the aid of Social Security.

Today, when she and I talked about the double-digit unemployment, the massive number of home foreclosures and abject poverty caused by the current economic situation in this country, I asked her how she got through that terrible time.

"I almost didn't," she said. "I was afraid my husband would get sick from the aggravation. I couldn't stop crying. We were a mess."

"Did you go for counseling?" I asked.

"Who would have paid for it? No. We did a lot of talking to each other and friends who cared. We realized that we were lucky to have a place to live, but our retirement plans were wiped out. No art school or travel."

"Were you angry?"

"You bet I was, but it passes. One day you wake up and realize that everything you have in this world is loaned to you. You may have it or not depending on many acts of God. We had to focus on our future."

"What about the kids?" I asked.

"Fortunately, they were all out of the house by then. At least the kids got through college OK."

We talked about someone we knew whose grandkids recently had to drop out of college and go to work when both parents lost their jobs. We talked about a widowed friend who walked away from her home when she tried unsuccessfully to sell it -- the mortgage was higher than the worth of the house. We talked about how it feels for a successful professional person to have to go to a soup kitchen for meals.

"It's all unthinkable," she said, "but the unthinkable happens. You can't let it get you down and destroy you."

"How long did it take until you guys got your heads together?"

"The better part of a year. We looked around us at other people's problems and began to count our blessings. We had each other and our health. The smiles of our children were more important than a fancy vacation. We started married life in a one-room apartment. We realized that, if necessary, we could do it again."

"My husband and I began our married life in a studio apartment with cockroaches," I said. "We could do it again, too, if we had to."

"My mother always said that she could only eat one steak at a time and wear only one dress at a time," my aunt said. "Life is not fair. When you get handed a lemon, you have to make lemonade out of it."

We laughed as we picked up the lemon wedges on our plates and squeezed them into our tea.

"My father had a couple of good posters in his office," I said. "One poster said: I complained I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet. The other one was the prayer that asks for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the strength to change those that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"That's it in a nutshell," she said. "I wish we could send copies of those posters to all the people suffering in this economic mess."

"We can't," I said. "But I'll write about it."

And I did.

Toby Rosenstrauch, an award-winning columnist, lives in Boynton Beach, Fla.