Pieces of my Grandparents

Reflecting on our relationship with past generations

Most of the time I write about how Stoicism can impact your relationship with the people around you, from family members to difficult coworkers to strangers on the other side of the world. But as different as all these types of people may be, they have one thing in common: they are currently alive. What about people from our past who are no longer living? What kind of relationship should we have with them?

From a Stoic perspective, Seneca makes it clear that when it comes to remembering our loved ones, the past is a gift:

Believe me: the people we have loved remain with us in large part even after chance has taken them away. The time that is past is ours; nothing is more secure than what has already been…

He who takes pleasure only in the present moment puts too tight a restriction on his enjoyment of life. Both the future and the past have pleasure to give, the one in expectation, the other in memory; but the future is contingent and may never be, while the past cannot fail to have been. What madness it is, then, to allow the most secure of all your possessions to slip from your grasp!

Seneca, Letters on Ethics, 99.4-5

So today, I’d like to spend a few moments reflecting on some people who were a significant part of my childhood: my grandparents. To help me in this reflection, I’ll show pictures of four household objects that remind me of them. I hope it encourages you to also pause and think about those—whoever they were—who once cared for you.

Object Lessons

My maternal grandmother, my last living grandparent, died right before Thanksgiving last year, and I’m very happy to have a couple of her small paintings to remember her by. Although Jean lived to 93, she had a difficult life: raised during the Great Depression by alcoholic parents, she was pregnant and married at 19, mother to five children by the age of 30, and endured the loss of a two-year-old daughter in very tragic circumstances. (The little girl fell down a decrepit stairwell right in front of my grandmother’s eyes and broke her neck. My grandmother carried her daughter in her own arms to the doctor, where she was pronounced deceased.) Jean then faced the stillbirth of her last baby, the child whose birth was supposed to help console her. Needless to say, she was utterly shattered, and life was never the same for anyone in their family.

But while my grandmother had very few emotional or material resources to help her cope, she nevertheless endured. She raised her four older children, was very involved in raising her grandchildren, and brought a spirit of lively wit and joie de vivre wherever she went. Jean was known in their small town for telling funny stories, cooking the best pineapple upside-down cake, and always taking a contrarian position on matters of town governance. She made fun of people who thought too highly of themselves but looked with eyes of love on those close to her.

Jean was far from perfect, but I often reflect with admiration on her ability to survive such difficult experiences and stay so perfectly herself. She was unapologetically unlike anyone else, which I think was quite difficult in a small Southern town in the mid-20th century. My grandparents lived frugally and, while aiming for financial security, didn’t think money or status was the most important thing in the world. If you’ve read my book Journal Like a Stoic, you’ll know I open the introduction with some of my favorite words of wisdom from Jean (“if someone tries to sell you magic beans, don’t buy them!”).

My grandmother was a talented singer and painter, and a lifelong reader who always surrounded herself with books. Although she lost her hearing later in life and could no longer converse easily, she never stopped reading. I picked up some of my favorite childhood novels—Wuthering Heights, All Creatures Great and Small—from her bookshelves, and some of my best memories are of paging through decades of old Reader’s Digests she kept on her shelf. Her home was a place of warmth, comfort, long Scrabble games, and ever-present biscuits and cornbread. No matter when we came by, she would always stop what she was doing and offer to whip up dinner (or let us dig into her cookie stash). You were always sure to receive a warm welcome at my grandmother’s house.

I’m very happy to have two of the paintings she did (in the 1970s) to remind me of her. Here is the one is in my dining room, which we enjoy looking at while we eat:

But I should also mention my other grandparents, who all played an important role in my childhood. My maternal grandfather, Marlon, was a jack-of-all-trades who did jobs ranging from from truck driver to mayor. (He’s also the inspiration for the carpenter grandfather in my Stoic mystery novel The Lost Discourses, which you can read here.) He built many things in his cabinet shop, and I’m fortunate to have one of the last big pieces he made—a china cabinet which now displays my kids’ artwork:

From my paternal grandfather I inherited not only many freckles but also the upright piano he bought at the end of his life to learn how to play, and which I spent many hours playing on myself at their house:

And while my father’s mother left us a whole house full of things, the object I most remember her by is a sturdy stainless steel colander that we use every day. This colander is almost indestructible and I plan to bequeath it to my own children! Here it is, currently holding green tomatoes from my husband’s garden (see if you can spot the little spider that hitched a ride inside):

Surrounding Advantages

I value being able to use and enjoy these objects around my house, and I remember my grandparents fondly every time I wash fruit in the colander or walk past the china cabinet. And while objects are not the most important things in life (not goods in themselves), they do form an important backdrop to our lives. The longer I practice Stoicism the more I appreciate that virtue is not about devaluing or discounting the things around you but about using the materials of life appropriately. It’s about deriving meaning and contentment from whatever happens to be there, which I think fits the description of the good emotion terpsis, translated by Chris Gill as “joy that is appropriate to the benefits around one” (Positive Emotions in Stoicism—Are They Enough?). It’s not that we depend on having certain objects but that we find joy in the things that are around us, deriving benefit from them however possible.

Surrounding myself with tokens from past generations helps enlarge my perspective on whatever I’m doing in the present. I think it’s a terrible mistake to completely disrespect or disregard people of the past just because they were not perfect or did some things we don’t agree with. Not only is there the practical argument that no one is perfect—and we will be judged in our turn by future generations who may have more delicate sensibilities than our own—but it’s theoretically misguided as well. We can still learn a great deal from what people did get right, and we can appreciate their accomplishments and positive characteristics while also acknowledging their faults. We can learn from their mistakes and strive to do better even as we admire their good qualities.

There’s also the problem of hubris, or thinking that you are much smarter than other people and not subject to any of their faults. I agree with Wikipedia’s take on the matter: “Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments, or capabilities.” Indeed. It’s definitely a loss of contact with reality that would lead someone to think that of all the people who have ever lived, they are the only one who has figured out all the right answers, qualified to pass judgment on everyone else who has ever lived.

While some cultures have made the mistake of idolizing the past, Western culture today tends to make the opposite mistake of idolizing the present at the expense of the past. I think the proper course is not to idolize anyone but to stay humble and open to learning, respecting those who try to be good or make the world a better place (even if they fail in some ways). Hubris inevitably leads to downfall; as Merriam-Webster says of the Greek myths, “Typically, overconfidence led the hero to attempt to overstep the boundaries of human limitations and assume a godlike status, and the gods inevitably humbled the offender with a sharp reminder of mortality.”

When it comes to relating to the people who came before us—whether we knew them or not—I think the best policy is cautious respect. Not blind veneration on the one hand or disdain for imperfections on the other, but a clear-sighted ability to appreciate the good while impartially critiquing the not-so-good. Fair-minded and understanding treatment, just like we try to offer the living, and just as we want others to offer us.

Choosing to Remember

Looking around at the physical things my grandparents left me, I am of course strongly reminded of the non-physical things they left too. All the love and attention they gave, all the choices they made to the best of their ability (even if it’s not what I would have chosen to do myself). Just like the people in our lives now, the people of the past did what they thought was best given their circumstances and life history. Like them, we have our own limitations, our own positive and negative traits, our own ways of coping with the difficulties of life.

It’s simply a matter of luck that, whereas my grandparents had to work their whole lives to make ends meet, I’ve had the advantages of education and leisure to dedicate myself to philosophy. We should never look down on other people for not achieving what we think is correct view of life, particularly when they live or lived in very different circumstances from ourselves. If we had been in their shoes, perhaps we would have made the same choices they did.

And who knows what our own family and associates will remember of us? I bet my paternal grandmother never would have guessed that I remember her every day by her colander, or my maternal grandmother that I would treasure a few amateur paintings she did 50 years ago. We don’t get to choose how people see us or what our legacy will be.

But we do get to choose how to remember our own forebears, and it is a choice. Like everything else in life, we can choose to focus on the bad or the good. We don’t forget the rough edges, and we don’t pretend everything was perfect. But Epictetus reminds us that

Everything has two handles, and it may be carried by one of these handles, but not by the other. If your brother acts wrongly towards you, don’t try to grasp the matter by this handle, that he is wronging you (because that is the handle by which it can’t be carried), but rather by the other, that he is your brother…and then you’ll be grasping the matter by the handle by which it can be carried.

Handbook, 43

In questions of the past, we have to choose which handle to carry, remembering that we are also setting an example for our children and all the generations to come. Do we want them to learn from our mistakes, but also recognize that we did our best? Yes. And don’t we owe as much to the generations that came before us? Yes. Respect and learning. It’s what we owe to both the future and the past.