Perched at the top of a hill on Manhattan’s Upper Westside sits a beautiful mausoleum. Its massive dome and stately columns rise high above the Hudson River, and yet President Ulysses S. Grant’s final resting place remains an oft-overlooked and relatively unknown destination. Its peaceful setting makes it a perfect visit during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season.
Storyboards chronicling the life of this army man turned politician line the walls of the main room. The last board recounts the end of Grant’s life, the years after his presidency when he and his wife made New York City their home. Bad luck left the Grants in financial ruin, and in an attempt to leave his family cared for, Grant agreed to write his memoirs and Mark Twain promised to publish them.
In the final stages of advanced throat cancer, talking was extremely painful for Grant. Thus, not only was he writing his memoirs, but most other communication as well. At some point during those days, he wrote the following in a letter to his physician, “I do not sleep, though I sometimes doze a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer I cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be, to do, or to suffer. I signify all three.”
Since reading those words while standing above Grant’s tomb, I have contemplated their meaning at length. Perhaps Grant meant that he had lost his identity and sense of who he was amidst the pain and suffering that engulfed him. Perhaps just “being” was all he could manage in his present state. Or perhaps somewhere in the depths and solitude of deep suffering, Grant honed into the essence of a much more important idea—that in the end what truly defines us are our actions, how we have lived our lives, particularly in the face of pain and despair.
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind,” Aristotle wrote, centuries before Grant’s time. In a profession where we strive to create beauty and greatness daily through being and doing, perhaps suffering is not just important, but even necessary. Grant coupled it with being and doing, implying an integral relationship between the three. Perhaps he was also saying that in suffering we discover who we really are.
Grant spent the final days of his life sitting on his porch in severe pain, candidly penning the final pages of his life history. He finished just days before his death. Twain’s firm published the two-volume work, and book sales shattered records, paying for all of Grant’s debts and making his family wealthy. He was a verb to the end, actively doing and being while suffering to bless those he left behind.
During this holiday season, as the craziness of concerts, parties, and presents can threaten to take over our lives, let’s take a quiet moment to evaluate our own lives. Suffering at some level comes to all. May we use it to refine us and to shape our lives, actions, and music making—the legacy we will one day offer to those we leave behind.
