How To Put Really Bad Stuff Into Perspective

People are alive, and people will be born, because other people's lives did not go according to plan

Ripple drawing by Tim Brook, my dad, circa 2016

Let me tell you a story—three stories, actually—about how I almost wasn’t born.

Here’s the first. My beloved paternal grandmother, Betty, lived in Kent, England, as a young woman. It was there that she met my grandfather, Jack. He was from Kent too, and after they married, they settled down in the local area and started a family.

Jack applied for a job as a managing clerk in a solicitor’s office, believing from the location description that it would mean working in a nearby town. In actual fact, the office was fifty miles away in Hertfordshire, all the way across London and out the other side. This presumably came as something of a surprise, but Jack accepted the job anyway. He and Betty relocated and brought up their children in a different Home County to the one they’d planned to live in, north of London instead of south of it.

If Betty and Jack hadn’t moved to Hertfordshire—if, say, they’d chosen to remain living near their families, or if Jack had double checked the location beforehand and decided not to apply after all—it’s reasonable to suppose that my father’s first teaching job wouldn’t have been in Hertfordshire either.

If my father’s first teaching job hadn’t been in Hertfordshire, it’s reasonable to suppose that he would never have met my mother, whose own first teaching job was at the same school.

And so it is also reasonable to suppose that I would not be sitting here writing this today if, in the early 1950s, my grandparents’ lives had not taken a turn for the unexpected.

Everyone owes their existence to accidentally consequential events like this, whether they know it or not. Things will have happened to your parents and grandparents and ancestors that meant they went places or did things or met people they wouldn’t have otherwise, and this will have caused knock-on effects through the generations that resulted in your birth. When you consider this, you begin to understand how miraculous it is that you are here at all. You probably take your existence for granted because you can’t fathom the idea of not existing—of never having existed. And yet the chain of events that brought you here, whatever it happens to be, could so easily not have happened.

This particular accidentally consequential event had a happy outcome. Betty and Jack thrived in Hertfordshire, and made many friends. But not all such events are happy. Sometimes they are devastating for those who must live through them.

Here’s the second story: Jack had a fatal heart attack in 1974, at the age of 51. When my father’s teacher training was over, he moved back home to live with the recently widowed Betty for a while, commuting from there to the school where he met my mother.

His teacher training had been in rural Norfolk, a place he loved and eventually returned to, and it’s conceivable that if not for his own father’s sudden death, he might simply have stayed there and found a job locally. And of course, had he done so, he and my mother would never have met. It’s always saddened me that I never got to meet my grandfather Jack, but it’s also possible that his death created the conditions for my existence. Perhaps, if he’d lived longer, I wouldn’t have met him because I wouldn’t have been born.

The further back you go, the bigger the ripples that emanate from the accidentally consequential event. The third story: as a child, my grandmother Betty lived in South London. Perhaps she would have stayed there if a Luftwaffe bomb hadn’t destroyed her family’s home on October 9th, 1940. Betty’s father, my great-grandfather Tom, was inside. He was injured, and died the next day in hospital. He was 44.

Widowed and homeless, Betty’s mother—also called Kate—moved her family out of the city because she’d heard, via an acquaintance, about some bungalows that were standing empty in a town in Kent. The family squatted in one until the landlord came by and agreed to let them stay, whereupon they began paying rent. There are descendants of Kate and Tom living in the area still.

You will recall that Betty and Jack met in Kent. Had her family not been driven to move there by the tragic events of that night in 1940, their paths would probably never have crossed. And if they hadn’t, my father would never have been born, and nor would my aunt, and therefore nor would I or my cousin or my cousin’s daughter.

Tom might have survived if he’d left the house and gone to the Anderson shelter before the bomb fell, or if it had fallen slightly further away, or fallen on a different night. But if he had, would the family still have moved to Kent? There were quite a few of them, and the bungalow was small—would there have been space for an extra person? He was an air raid warden and worked in the area—would he have been able or willing to leave London?

If the family ultimately only went to Kent because he’d been killed, that means three generations of people were born as a result of his untimely death. We live because he died. It seems horribly unfair that he never got to see his children grow up, but I also have to feel grateful that he didn’t, because I like existing.

There must be thousands—millions—of stories like these in the world, in which one person’s misfortune or death leads indirectly to another’s birth. We don’t think about these stories all that much because they are intergenerational, which makes them difficult to remember and impossible to predict. But perhaps we ought to think about them more often.

When bad things happen, we lament them—as of course we should. We try to prevent them happening again—as we also should. And yet still they happen. In the apparent absence of any ability, as a species, to stop doing harm, to eliminate wars and atrocities and unjust deaths, perhaps it can help us to remember that there are people in the world who only live because others had their lives taken from them. And there are people who will exist in the future because others die in the present.

Destruction and creation are not mutually exclusive: think of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where human society was destroyed but wildlife now thrives. Some stories only exist in the world because different stories were cut short. We forget, because we don’t live long enough to gain a meaningful perspective on such things. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, new things grow out of the absence of things we have lost.

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