Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

We’re all given legacies, he explains. “We don’t have a choice. Legacies can be profoundly joyful and wonderful. I was given a legacy of suffering and death, but also of survival and existential guilt. I grew up lonely. Everyone had died, so many of our relatives never had a chance to create a life. We were left alive, and we didn’t know why.” His voice, as he relates all this, is muted, in a way that I recognize from my own grandfather. It’s as if there’s a larger, more powerful voice in there, of the grandson of partisans who fought bravely in the Polish forests. It’s as if he’s keeping that voice safely hidden in the hole under the stove. “One could view it as a burden, be crushed by it,” he continues, looking away from me, at the rain outside the window. “But it’s a matter of choosing your attitude to the legacy you’re given. There has to be a reason—a meaning for why we survived, and others didn’t.”