We Must Do Our Own Caring

It has taken me many years to arrive at the point where I can write this. For all my days I have wished that other people would share in my sense of wonder and my sense of joy at the things we learn and the beauty we see. I regret to say that it is time to acknowledge that the circle of people who share these things will likely be very limited.

As a student, teacher, and a professor, my enthusiasm and joy at having discovered so much to help us understand the world has brought me much personal satisfaction, but it is a rare thing to ever hear from former students or colleagues. They have their lives, I say silently, and so I console myself with the adage that in the classroom we never know whose life we may touch.

When no longer in the classroom, I pine for the days when I would see the light come into their eyes upon the discovery of an historical insight. When others are unaware, I still enjoy the memories of the journey and the satisfaction of learning in a personal way.

Part of this scarcity of people to share our joys is probably generational. Our parents had lifelong friends, many of whom they had met during the war and just after. They were a literate generation without cell phones or even answering machines. They wrote thank you notes after gifts. They wrote cards. I still remember the names of people my folks met in their hometown or worked with or met for a few weeks during the war that I never met or barely knew.

My mother sent perhaps fifty or seventy-five Christmas cards every year to these friends and acquaintances of long ago and received as many in return. They had shared critical moments of their lives with them, and they wanted to remember. They wrote letters. Long distance calls were costly, but they made those, too. One of the regrets of that generation was that as they aged, their friends passed before them and the card list became shorter each year. These were bittersweet events for the greatest generation.

Growing up surrounded by people born in the last ten years of the nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth, I assumed we would live our lives as they lived theirs. All four of my grandparents arrived in the old hometown in their twenties just after the Great War. All four of them died there in their eighties and nineties. 

My folks lived, went to school, married, and began their families in their hometown until their youngest was seven years old. They were in their late thirties before they moved away and of course many of their contemporaries never moved away at all. 

They had roots there that my generation never had. Both my parents attended frequent high school reunions for the Classes of 1940 and 1941 and knew everybody there. They shared surviving the crucible of the war. That experience humbled them and quieted them and gave them a deep respect for the sanctity of life. My family moved away from the home town just as the wrecking of that world began in the 1960s. Nothing was ever the same for me again, although I failed to see it until into and after the 1990s. Even then it was hard to believe.

So I’m puzzled over and over by the discovery that people are just not like that anymore. How often do I say why don’t they care? There are people we knew well and worked alongside, people we helped, people who understood our comical situations, people I saw on a daily basis for six straight years, people who shared pain and trauma, people who taught beside me, people I considered friends, but precious few of them ever contacted me or responded to my efforts to reconnect.

We shared remarkable times, memorable backgrounds and common origins, but now they don’t care. I don’t understand it.

People can go strange on us, friends, even siblings and other family members who have been close may grow cynical in their own paths, but still we must care. We must water the garden of our hope and our passions.

We must settle, I’m afraid, for those few cherished souls who will share our joy, no matter how few they be. With luck, we find a spouse or a true friend, or the best of both worlds that comes when these persons are the same person. There, with that one, we can savor every precious day and treasure each memory whether bitter or sweet. And if there are none to share, then we must cherish the moment ourselves, hoping that from our legacy others will notice something different about us, then seek to find it themselves.

We must not give in to the despair. If Viktor Frankl can survive the camps with a hopeful heart, then surely we can make the attempt.

Sometimes friends fall away and follow a variant path. Unless we wish to be remembered as compromisers or appeasers or just jaded old husks, we must continue to care.

Caring is appreciation, the acknowledgement of the importance of our activities, our lives, and our intrinsic worth when the whole world says we are of no consequence. We must fight the world on this point.

When we’re the only one who seems to care, it’s a lonely place. But we must keep on doing it. We will work to do our very best, and that will just have to be good enough, but someone must do it.

I hope, dear reader, that you will be among those with whom I can exult at the discovery of greens in the garden that made it through the winter, in the ache of regrets over what I should have done but didn’t. Mourn with me the bitter pill which is the things I did but should not have. Share the beauty of lessons learned in so many painful ways. Smile with me at the renewal of love after all hope for it had been surrendered to a bleak future. Feel the warmth and inner glow given by a fire in the stove on a winter’s day and the early arrival of the snowbirds for another winter stay.

Above all, if it matters to us, if it’s to matter at all, if anything is to matter, we must do the caring. Someone has to. Who better to care than you and me?