If not me, who? If not now, when?

I’m posting this photo of my mother's father, whom I never really knew. My only memory of him is that he would hide a fifty cent piece in one hand and a nickel in the other, and ask me which one I wanted. I always said the ‘big nickel’. Guess I had a career ahead as a lawyer.

He died when I was about 4 years old, badly, of cancer, back in the day when even the pain of that couldn’t be well controlled. I think about my Mom, the only daughter, who had to be about 37 at the time, trying to juggle a young family of four kids and one on the way, Thad, with whom she was 8 months pregnant. I can’t imagine.

I don’t fully understand the philosophy of ‘stoicism’ but in its common usage, I’ve always thought it applied to my family – that is, not so much to me, but the generations above me. Marcus Aurelius, author of Meditations (b: 121 AD, d: 180 AD) said:

Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.

They believed that implicitly, even without reading Marcus Aurelius. My Mom, the mother living through the illness and death of her parents and a few babies, my Dad, the father, living through his mother’s death at a young age, and then, oh, yes, the Battle of the Bulge and all that fun stuff which it has taken him years to be able to talk about. And both their parents and grandparents – leaving tiny peasant towns in Italy, and Germany and Norway and Scotland for something else, something better, always believing that their strength just HAD to be equal to the task. There wasn’t another option. And generally their strength always was.

I don’t think we are as strong now as individuals, as a people. I’d like to think so, but I don’t.