Helping One Another Through The Tight Squeezes
By Bill
One of my favorite plays is a sprawling, non-realistic epic by Thornton Wilder, called The Skin of Our Teeth. The play is a metaphor, tracing the lives of the imaginary Antrobus family as they navigate through a series of disasters including an approaching Ice Age, a Great Flood, and a World War. The Antrobus family represents all humanity, careening from crisis to crisis and trying to keep our footing. To set up this idea, one character says repeatedly in the first scene: “We came through the depression by the skin of our teeth; one more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”
A few weeks ago, during a family gathering, I stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes with my aunt. As we scraped and rinsed, loading some things into the dishwasher and handwashing others, she expressed her distress about how terrible things are in the world now. Now. Specifically now. And I started thinking. About The Skin of Our Teeth. “We came through the depression by the skin of our teeth; one more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”
There my aunt and I stood, surrounded by mountains of food and healthy family members. In a modern home, loading an electric dishwasher. Sounds of lively conversation and excited children floated in from the other rooms. Were we living in a terrible time? Not in that moment, certainly. We were living in a moment of joy and plenty and peace and great good fortune.
True, there had been heartache in the extended family in recent years. Losses. Illness. Shocks. But we made it through those, sometimes by the skin of our teeth, just as our ancestors made it through the losses and illnesses and shocks in their lives. Sometimes we get so focused on the difficulties of our own time that two things happen: first, we forget to appreciate the moments of peace and joy and love while we are living through them. Secondly, we forget to put our problems into context.
I’ve been a passionate genealogist for almost as long as I’ve been doing theatre. Years of poring over old German church records, musty family Bibles, and archival newspapers have perhaps given me a different perspective on what constitutes tough times.
My great-grandmother Louisa Hummel, the youngest of 13 children, was 28 days old when her mother died. Before she was two years old, her father was dead too.
Frances Heness, one of my great-great grandmothers, gave birth to her 15th child at the age of 39. Her husband, the father of all 15 children, had been dead for four months. Poverty in Wales threatened the survival of the remaining family members, but she did not remarry. A few years later, she and the surviving children set off for America.
My eighth great-grandparents Christian and Anna Cleophe Lau left Alsace for America in 1732 with their children. During the difficult Atlantic crossing, a large number of the passengers staged a mutiny and successfully seized control of the ship, threatening death to those who opposed them.
My tenth great-grandparents Maria and Michael Brotshelm fled Bohemia during the violence of the Thirty Years War. This war, which began in their homeland of Bohemia, turned into a protracted series of battles, famines, persecution, and pestilence. Hoping to escape the devastation, Maria and Michael and their children became refugees in Wuerttemberg in the 1630s or 1640s.
Another great-great-grandmother, Mary Jane Middleton, was the mother of three children. Two of them died of diptheria, three weeks apart, in 1882, at the ages of 7 and 5. I have a possession of hers that has been passed down through the family: a 19th-century book on how to cope with grief.
My fourth great-grandparents Seth Dicks and wife Elizabeth Hunt were Quakers. They struggled to maintain their Quaker values and beliefs in North Carolina, where they were surrounded by slave-owners, so they uprooted their lives and moved to Indiana. Meanwhile, they and all their relatives were also grappling with the HIcksite schism of 1827, an idealogical conflict between Quakers over the comparative importance of the Inward Light and the Bible.
During a 32 day period in the fall of 1632, my tenth great-grandfather Hans Neu helplessly watched eight of his young children and his wife die of the bubonic plague. He lived three more years, leaving only one surviving son: my ninth great-grandfather. The genetic line had almost been extinguished, but it persisted.
As far back as I can find records of my ancestors, and of course beyond, there has been suffering. Sickness. Grief. My ancestors made it through by the skin of their teeth. One more tight squeeze like that, and where will we be?
None of this is meant to trivialize the challenges we face, and the world faces. Because these ancestors didn’t make it through because of some kind of coincidence or luck. They made it through because of the generosity and humanity and goodness of people. Louisa Hummel was taken in and raised by her mother’s childless sister. The church community in Untergruppenbach Wuerttemberg welcomed the Brotshelms into their congregation. Fellow Alsatian immigrants helped Christian and Anna Cleophe Lau establish their family in Pennsylvania. Neighbors took pity on the plight of Hans Neu after his devastating losses. Frances Heness’s young adult children went to work to support their mother and put food on the table for their fatherless siblings. It cannot have been easy for all those people to give their time and treasure to make life bearable for others when the world, or their corner of it, seemed to be falling apart.
And that brings me to another quote from The Skin of Our Teeth:
“I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for… All I ask is a chance to build new worlds, and God has always given us that.”
But how does God give us that? I propose that God, or whatever higher power you believe in, gives us that chance through other people. To reference yet another play, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in No Exit that “Hell is other people.” I suggest the opposite. God, or at least the workings of God, is other people. I don’t believe it is enough to sit back and say that God is in charge, or to say we have faith that God has a plan. We are the plan. Many people are quick to say that God sent us Jesus. My perspective is different: he sent us one another. We have the power to help one another through the tight squeezes. We can comfort the mother who lost her children. We can welcome the refugees. We can stand up for what is right and good.
And on a more immediate level, in our everyday lives, in the moments when the stakes are not so high, when the dishwasher is working fine and the food was good and the children are laughing; and we have the satisfaction of knowing that we will help, we will greet, we will raise each other up in times of crisis and help one another get through by the skin of our teeth, we can look around and acknowledge that, in this beautiful moment: this is a wonderful time to be alive.
Disclaimer: Guest blog posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Sad Times or Sad Times LLC.
