The lessons they learned in their times of trial

They do.

This Democratic primary for Ted Kennedy’s US Senate seat has been a brief and mostly sleepy one, dominated by slogans and TV spots. We’ve seen little of how the four hopefuls interact with ordinary people, and even less of how they deal with the obstacles and adversities of life, or with the madness and rigor of a full-length campaign. And so we’ve had far fewer chances to break the surface, to get some sense of the people behind the talking points.

Maybe that’s why so many voters have said they’re undecided in this race.

While setbacks don’t always define people, they help us to understand who they are, and how they come to their beliefs. So I asked the four Democrats who would be Senator to talk about a personal setback they’ve faced.

Their answers were heartfelt, and arresting: One had a brother who refused treatment for mental illness for 16 years, then killed himself. One had a newborn son tethered to a bleating monitor in an intensive care unit. One was judged because of his name and his appearance. One welcomed a daughter into the world, only to learn she needed open-heart surgery.

Those are some of the trials faced by the four Democrats competing in Tuesday’s contest. And this is what those experiences taught them.

The police officer came to Martha Coakley’s Dorchester door on an October afternoon in 1996 to deliver the news. Her brother had hanged himself.

Edward Coakley had been a bright kid, a talented pianist like his father, for whom he was named. But at 17, in his freshman year in college, he had a breakdown, then a rapid descent into debilitating mental illness. When he agreed to see doctors, they diagnosed him with severe depression, paranoia, and obsessive behavior.

Mostly, though, he refused treatment. After his father died in 1993, Edward’s behavior grew more erratic. When he wasn’t reclusive, he would go on tirades, smashing things. He often seemed angriest at his sister Martha, the ambitious, rising prosecutor.

“He had very traditional views of women,’’ she recalled. “He didn’t like what I was doing.’’

After Coakley’s mother died in 1995, Edward barricaded himself in the family’s North Adams house, refusing to come out, or to let Martha Coakley and her sisters in to plan the funeral. The grieving sisters had their own brother arrested for threatening them, hoping the criminal justice system would force him into treatment so that he might finally be well.

“It didn’t work,’’ the attorney general said.

He was committed for a few weeks, but refused help afterward. He returned to his parents’ house, barely able to care for himself. Before long, the house was ruined.

After a second short stint in an institution, Edward killed himself.

“In the criminal justice system, I saw far too many people who ended up as my brother did, because they couldn’t get or wouldn’t accept help,’’ Coakley said, pausing to collect herself. Many like him suffer, she said, for want of early diagnosis.

“If we had been able to treat Edward’s illness earlier,’’ she wondered, “could we have helped him before it got too far, and we couldn’t bring him back?’’

‘It consumed me,’’ said Congressman Mike Capuano, his voice catching. “Even now, I still get choked up every time I see an incubator.’’

Capuano’s son weighed less than two pounds when he was born, a few weeks premature, in 1980. It had been a complicated pregnancy, and doctors couldn’t explain to the new parents why their son was so small, and so frail.

Michael was attached to tubes in the neonatal intensive care unit at Beth Israel, surrounded by other babies all fighting for their lives. Capuano and his wife practically lived at the hospital for those 2 1/2 months. Even 29 years later, the congressman finds himself reflexively heading for Beth Israel whenever he’s in the Longwood area.

Spending that much time in the NICU, willing his own son to survive, he got to know other struggling babies’ stories too: The home birth that went horribly wrong; the mother who proceeded with a pregnancy knowing she might not make it, and didn’t; the babies born to drug users, or to parents who never came to see them. Capuano and his wife, Barbara, held those babies, too.

The Capuanos were lucky. Michael left the hospital just before Christmas. And his father had health insurance, so the $180,000 it took to save his son’s life was taken care of.

“That drives me today,’’ Capuano, the candidate, said. “Watching infants being abandoned by their parents, watching parents who didn’t have the flexibility we had to be with their children, it was tough. But it reaffirmed my commitment to the idea that we owe something to every one of those infants.’’

‘I didn’t know they had Italians at Harvard Business School.’’

That’s what Steve Pagliuca remembers some New York recruiters saying when he was looking for finance jobs after earning his graduate degree in 1982. It stung; he can still feel it. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t change the fact that he was Italian - and wouldn’t want to. He’d always been so proud of his heritage, of his grandfather, who had come from a tiny town in Italy to make a life for his family as a shoemaker.

His grandfather lived from paycheck to paycheck. He spoke no English and had no job mobility. It was a modest life, but a good one, and the lessons handed down to the young Steve Pagliuca were clear: Hard work of any kind was a noble thing; and everybody deserved respect, no matter where they came from.

When he began his financial career in New York in the early 1980s, those lessons met a hard reality.

Pagliuca had little money back then. He dressed in cheap polyester suits. Some potential employers couldn’t get past that.

“They’d advise me that I needed to look a certain way to get ahead,’’ he recalled. “It makes you feel inadequate. I came from a background [where] nobody cared what you looked like.’’

The Celtics co-owner was almost apologetic about offering this as an example of a setback in his life. He knows other people have faced far bigger ones. But he said it’s a personal experience that has informed his views on almost everything.

“I’ve been very lucky,’’ he said. “But it’s made me really care about equality, the belief that you judge people on their performance, and not what they look like, or their sexual orientation. I didn’t see those things in other people, and after people saw those things in me, it gave me an incredible sense of what it must be like for people who are more different than I am, who experience much more insensitivity and indifference than I did.’’

Alan Khazei and his wife, Vanessa, had always been the kind of people who could put their minds to something and accomplish it. No obstacle was a match for their formidable willpower.

Except this one. Three days after their miraculous Mirabelle was born, doctors told them her heart wasn’t functioning properly: a valve was blocked, there was a hole, veins were in the wrong place. She would need surgery.

“We were shattered,’’ Khazei said, seven years later. “It’s the only time I’ve really been scared in my life.’’

He and Vanessa were new, nervous parents. They expected to be worrying about whether their baby would sleep well and gain weight, not sitting in a hospital waiting room for three eternal hours, wondering if she would make it out of surgery.

She did.

Then came the three-month recovery.

“We were so worried, we kind of went into our own private world,’’ the candidate recalled. “But we got incredible support from our friends. When we got home from the hospital, there were 20 bouquets at our house. People would visit us every day.’’

Khazei said that, even at the time, he and his wife were acutely aware that their daughter’s survival was a matter of dumb luck - a happy consequence of having been born to parents who happened to live a couple miles from the best hospitals in the country, rather than in some poor village far from expert care.

And they were equally grateful for their health insurance, that “all we had to worry about was, ‘Is our little girl going to make it?’ That was enough. That is a right, not a privilege. In the greatest country in the world, everybody should have access to the care our daughter had.’’

After those harrowing first months with Mirabelle, they decided they could handle anything, as long as their kids were all right.

“It gave me a perspective on what is important, and what is truly hard,’’ he said. “This campaign is easy.’’

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com