EDITORIAL:

Sometimes when you’re having a crummy day it helps to remember people like Justin Ogata.

The Costa Mesa man’s life was forever altered in a paralyzing wrestling accident in 1969. The Costa Mesa High School student was just 16 years old. Doctors gave him less than a year to live.

Then a year passed. He was still alive. Doctors figured then he had another five years. But he survived that diagnosis too. He would go on to live 39 more years.

And was he bitter? Not by a long shot, his loved ones say.

“He was a fighter,” his sister Donna Ogata said. “He always thought he was going to make it, that he will be walking in a year.”

His optimism was contagious.

“It was the best medicine for all of us, staying in touch with Justin,” said longtime friend Bruce Bishop, who met Justin when he was 12. “The guy was like Superman. You never heard him cry about anything.”

“The thing that was really amazing about him was that he was never depressed or let his illness get him down,” his caretaker Melissa Delgado said. “He still tried to do as much as he could do, as far as his illness would let him.”

It’s a good lesson for all of us. The next time life’s got you down, remember how it didn’t drag down Justin.