survivor

A survivor is a person who came through when others did not. The sole survivor, survivors of the crash, a cancer survivor.

It names both the fact and, increasingly, an identity — survivor is now the preferred term over victim in work on abuse and on serious illness, precisely because it puts the person's endurance first. Survivor guilt is the well-documented feeling of having lived when others died. Note survivorship bias, the mistake of studying only what came through and concluding that whatever it did must have worked.