Obligations to others through time
You will die and be forgotten, part 2
Greetings from Pennsylvania! I’m visiting my sister this weekend for my niece’s first communion. It’s been raining and gloomy, but it is always nice to spend time with family. This week’s essay is continuation of last week’s. I am trying to reach for a secular answer to what our obligations are for a worthy life.
My grandmother was born in a small town in western Massachusetts called Palmer shortly before the beginning of World War I. Specifically she lived in the village of Thorndyke, which at some point became an enclave of Polish immigrants. Her parents had immigrated a few years before, looking for a better life. It wasn’t hard to find a better life than the one they left behind, and, although they didn’t know it, things were only going to get worse for the family they left behind (WWI, WWI, Soviet communism).
All of my family immigrated to the United States during the early- to mid-20th century, all fleeing poverty. This is a common story for most of the families I knew growing up in New England. While there are people in New England who have roots that go back to the Mayflower, I didn’t know any of those or if I did, they weren’t in my social circles. Almost everyone I knew could trace their lineage back to Europe within a generation or two. There were lots of Italians, Irish, Jews, and of course Poles. Everyone was working their way up from grinding poverty. That was the narrative of most of my friends’ families. Although by the time I came along most folks were doing ok, the social scars of poverty and want take generations to escape, sometimes more. Which is what I want to talk about as a follow up to last week’s piece.
My great grandfather had died long before I was born. My great grandmother was still alive, but senile and confused, and that, combined with the fact that she had never learned to speak English, prevented my sister and I from having any sort of relationship with her, even when we made trips to Thorndyke to pay respects to my grandmother’s sisters who continued to live in the crooked house that my great grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had built, and in which many of his nine children were born.
My grandmother, when she spoke of her father, referred to him as a “card”, by which she meant he was humorous and made great jokes. She mentioned many times one of the great pranks he pulled on his children. One year on Christmas Eve, his children had hung their stockings up in hopes of getting some Christmas candy. The children woke to find their father had put coal in their stockings. This was his big joke. And there was no candy. Just coal. He laughed when his children all cried. This is what made him a card.
My grandmother had several younger sisters. With a big family like hers, the older children were often tasked with caring for the younger children. One of her younger sisters was maybe four, as I know the story, and was playing with the coal stove they had in the kitchen for cooking. My grandmother was supposed to be watching her. Her hair caught fire and she burned to death. My great grandmother never forgave my grandmother.
My grandmother quit school when she was in eighth grade and first went to be a live-in maid and then eventually made her way east to Waltham where she worked in factories until after World War II when she married my grandfather and settled down. They had only one child, my mother. As a young woman, my grandmother was lucky to be quite beautiful by the standards of the time. I have a black and white picture of her in a bride’s maid dress from one of her sisters’ weddings and she could have been a 1940’s movie star. She used that beauty to good effect to get men’s attention and get them to do things for her. She was, in a sense, a proto-feminist - in the sense that she saw men as just tools to be used. She was strong and independent, and in a time when most young women were married by the time they were 18, she remained single until she was 36. When the war came to an end, she observed that “all of the best men were taken”, so she picked my grandfather, who was ten years her junior, and that was that.
I loved my grandmother dearly. When I was a kid, she was a joy for me to spend time with. She taught me how to play cards - she especially liked Rummy 500, and a weird game called Pochino, and of course Yahtzee, and other things. She made gawumpki (I think the proper spelling is golumpki, but we always said gawumpki), a Polish stuffed cabbage dish, and she made lumpy cream of wheat. I loved her cornmeal cookies, and she always had peanut butter fudge from the farm stand where she worked for most of my childhood. She doted on me, as you might be able to tell from my fondness. But she was mean to almost everyone else, including her own daughter.
My mother often talked about how her own mother had treated her. She was distant, cold, and often unkind. My mother lived much of her life trying to be different from my grandmother. My grandmother was an uneducated, working-class woman; my mother put herself through college and spent much of her life reading and learning, and trying to become a cultured person and escape her own background. My mother died young, younger than I am now, but she made great progress in the direction she chose. She was for a time a teacher, but more importantly she was a leader in her church. When she passed away, the church was full. She made a positive impact on many lives.
I don’t know any details about what my great grandfather was like. I have his name somewhere and maybe a picture. I’m not all that interested in finding out more, to be honest. It would be interesting to know what part of Poland he and my great grandmother came from, I suppose. But not much more than that. I am not much in touch with the other descendents of that side of the family, now that my great aunts are gone and the crooked house has passed into the hands of some other family. My great aunts were always kind to my sister and I when we would visit, but it was not a trip I ever looked forward to. There was a darkness to the house - both physical and emotional.
I said last week to begin with the end in mind - that you will die and be forgotten. How does this fact inform how we should live our lives? My great grandfather is gone and mostly forgotten. I have a few more stories that I won’t tell - I’ve already told enough. And those stories will be forgotten eventually. And eventually no one will remember anything about him. Someday, the crooked house will be torn down and something else will be built in its place. And although he is mostly forgotten, his actions from a hundred years ago have echoed down through the generations. His actions shaped my grandmother, whose actions shaped my mother, who shaped me, and now I have shaped my own children.
Our actions are like rocks thrown into a pond - the results ripple out far from where the action landed, in ways that are unpredictable. I believe that even though we cannot know where those ripples will lead, and how they will interact with the results of others’ choices, we are responsible for the good or harm that our actions cause. My great grandfather was a hard man. When I think about the effect of poverty, I think about him, and of the other men and women who dominated that generation of immigrants. The ripples that shaped them were perhaps even more brutal than the ones they created. Though I have focused on the bad, the chain is not all bad. Good and bad flow out from our actions. And of course these ripples are not just between family, but with the whole of human community. We have an obligation to the future which we have to fulfil to be worthy of this life.
I could imagine my great grandfather reading this newsletter and saying, you are in the best country in the world because I left everything I knew behind and came to a strange country. Buck up. And he would be right. He was a mean bastard, from what I gather. Could he have done better? Only history knows.
We will die and be forgotten, and yet our impact on others carries on long after. For me, this means that we have an obligation to others to do our best to do no harm, and our second to do our best with what we have.
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Addendum: My father tells me that the village my great grandfather came from was destroyed during WWII. The church, which would have had genealogical records was also destroyed. Nothing remains.