Chip Minemyer: Seeing beyond mere mortality

Dec. 3—Tall and lean, a quiet and thoughtful man of the land, my grandfather would have been right at home in the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel — gazing across a rugged landscape and pondering the complexities of the human condition.

I was just nine when my grandfather's passing introduced me to the cold truth of mortality.

I knew him only as an older gentleman — laughing softly as he scratched my cheek with his whiskers, or sitting in the corner of his kitchen while smoking cigarettes he had rolled himself and occasionally spitting something into a trash can by his chair.

Emphysema took him in 1972. My mother, one of his seven children, followed him thanks to COVID-19 in 2020.

Photographs around my grandparents' house showed younger versions of my grandfather — seemingly always with wispy, white hair — walking horses on the farm or looking out across the fields with an expression somewhere between satisfaction and acceptance.

He was never wealthy, at least not in the financial sense, and his economy extended to his mannerisms; he preferred observation over pontification.

But gone — even from illness at a late age? My child's brain was forced to reckon with that finality.

And while Roy could have been a leading man — or at least a role player — in a McCarthy epic about the harshness of nature and the greater harshness of human relationships, he has defied the author's suggestion that legacy is a myth.

Of course, my grandfather, a man of faith, did believe the soul endures.

But is there more to be left to posterity?

In his intense and powerful 1994 book "The Crossing," McCarthy offered a dismal view of the mortal journey — filled with unfair moments and unkind strangers — and an equally pessimistic perspective on those who have gone before:

"The past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. ... Memories dim with age.

"There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers."

McCarthy wrote of a man who collected old photographs of people he had never met, and displayed them almost mockingly.

"The world was made new each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more. ...

"He searched those faces. Looks of vague discontent. Looks of rue. Perhaps some burgeoning bitterness at things in fact not yet come to be which yet were now forever past."

I suppose my grandfather had regrets over things he had done — or not done. Perhaps he wished he had stopped smoking those cigarettes when there was still time.

But he would have told that younger me — maybe he did — that there were mean- ingful memories wrapped up in those husks of the past, and that we should embrace each opportunity to plant, to grow; that we should welcome each new chapter.

Even the ones that carry us toward the end of the story.

With each passing month, week — day — the concept of mortality seemingly accelerates while moving more sharply into focus, forcing a reckoning of the ephemeral nature of experiences, of lives, of careers.

Despite increasingly frequent allegations to the contrary, we journalists tend to be a thoughtful and conscientious lot. We care — that's the starting point — about our communities, about our craft and about our institutions, generally in that order.

We preach from the book of ethics — and hope others see value in the ideals of honesty, integrity, trust. My grandfather would have seen an enduring value in those characteristics.

Of course, morality is not a shield against mortality.

But character — those defining traits seen by others in your beliefs and actions — can be a pathway to something more significant than an extra-long life or photographs on a wall.

Yes, the world moves on, but you hope it carries a piece of you with it just the same.

My grandfather would have looked across a McCarthy- envisioned landscape — weedy, lifeless, desolate — and would have thought to himself:

"I know what seeds just might make it here, with a little care, a bit of nurturing.

"And hopefully," he would think, "they'll keep growing long after I'm gone."

Chip Minemyer is the editor and general manager of The Tribune-Democrat and TribDem.com, GM of The Times-News of Cumberland, Md., and CNHI regional editor for Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina. He can be reached at 814-532-5091. Follow him on Twitter @MinemyerChip.