When Character and Destiny Become One
Reflections on One Woman’s Hard Life
“Character is Destiny.”
Heraclitus (535 BCE — 475 BCE)
I don’t know about you, but as ancient Greek proverbs go, that is one of my favorites.
Why?
In three short words it offers rare reassurance to everyone who deals from time to time with elements seemingly out of our control. It says that one’s fortune can and will be determined more by who we are on the inside than how we appear on the outside. It also serves as a model of conduct — do the right thing and your future will be assured — that is as good, if not better, than anything a CEO or best-selling self-help guru could come up with on his or her best day.
Don’t let the lofty ideas throw you off. Character, while not easy to pin down in so many words, is real, no matter what the era; and destiny is not something reserved only for the rich and famous.
Case in point — in the early 1900s a young woman named Margaret was growing up on a small farm in the rural township of Irving, Wisconsin. The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, she, like countless other girls of that time, held on to simple dreams: find a good man, fall in love and raise a family. Most likely this would mean a hard but stable life working on a farm. In those days this was a calling of the highest honor.
Margaret did indeed meet a good man, and in 1919, at the age of twenty-five, she married Adolph Thompson, a native North Dakotan nine years her senior. Together they took over his family’s small dairy farm in Wisconsin and welcomed the arrival of two daughters in the next three years. Everything was playing out just as she had always hoped and prayed it would.
But good fortune wouldn’t last.
The first heartache came in 1923 when her third child, a boy, was born with a congenital digestive disorder that made it more and more difficult for him to digest any food. It might well have been what is known today as esophageal achalasia, a rare and potentially deadly affliction that can occur in very young children.
But back then no such diagnosis, let alone cure, was known. Home remedies and prayer vigils were not enough. Even doctors at the nearest county hospital in Marshfield were powerless to save him. Margaret could only watch as her son, Adolph Harvey Thompson, grew weaker by the day until finally his body gave out and he starved to death. He was four months old.
(Incredibly this wasn’t the first time Margaret experienced such grief. Twenty years earlier her younger sister, Gina, died when she too was only an infant, purportedly from malnutrition due to another digestive ailment.)
Then in 1937 Margaret’s husband suffered a crippling stroke that left him so weak as to be unable to do any more work on the farm. He struggled with life from then on, dying in 1946. Through it all Margaret and the children soldiered on as best they could and somehow kept the farm going.
A decade later calamity struck again when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and ended up undergoing a radical double mastectomy, the pain and scars of which would doubtless make any patient or oncologist cringe today. Still, she raised her family of five children without complaint or compromise, and never gave up or stopped caring when it would have been damn easy to do just that.
Margaret Thompson was my maternal grandmother.
Growing up, I always regarded her as a sweet, smiling woman who was as fine and delicate as a porcelain doll. I had no idea how strong she was.
So whether you know it or not, someone somewhere in your family’s past likely struggled against longer odds than you will ever know, and thanks to their strength and perseverance you are here now reading this. Thanks to them you have character firmly on your side.
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