With my eyes closed I can see my grandfather sitting on the front porch of his home wearing his iconic Pittsburgh Pirates hat, Hemingway beard, boat shoes with socks, tapered navy sweatpants, a long-sleeve, powder blue polo shirt and reading glasses. He is smiling. In his 90th year of life his blue eyes sparkle with a boyish mischief. He was a man of legendary wit, renowned for his sayings, one-liners and a sense of humor that seems to be disproportionately concentrated among Jewish men of his era. Born in 1918 on Fox Street in the south Bronx, his was a long, epic life stuffed with experience. He was prone to repetition but he wasn’t redundant; repeating the same slogans did not dilute his wisdom, it fortified the simple power of his words.
Reflecting on how I try to respond to crisis, I am thinking of one of his sayings in particular. A young man and an aging man, he would gesture towards me, gesture toward himself and say: "These are the golden years."
Steve Jobs, in his now famous Stanford commencement address, had a similar message: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
There is an important difference between the thought process of my grandfather and Steve Jobs, one an older many dying at 90 from wear and tear and the heartbreak of burying his only daughter, one a man dying of cancer before his time. For Jobs, death is the event to consider; for my grandfather, it was life.
On March 5, 2008, my dear friend and former college roommate was abducted from our college house, driven at gun point to multiple ATMs, then executed in the middle of the street and left to die. During the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the heart of Port-Au-Prince, killing hundreds of thousands, leaving millions homeless, millions more traumatized, and an already-precarious country in dire straits. Working at the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti at the time, I played a part in responding to the crisis. On March 17, 2010, my mother was killed while riding her bicycle to work. On April 27, my grandfather, her father, passed away in his home, in a powder-blue long sleeve polo shirt.
With as much sincerity and gravitas I can put on paper - without looking you in the eye and communicating with my expression that I could not mean this more - I hope that you don’t have to suffer crisis to understand the wisdom in my grandfather’s words. Live your life. And, if you do experience crisis, it seems we still have no choice. I am forever different because of the events of the last three years, I miss my mother more than I can say, am baffled by Eve’s senseless murder, and don’t understand how there can be so many people “doing good” or “serving the poor” and yet we are approaching a global population of 7 billion and half of the humans on the planet survive on $2 a day. Even still, despite heartache and uncertainty, life is the event to behold, enjoy, and maximize. These are the golden years.
