Yours truly at Grandpa Viktor's gravesite
24 August 2013
Vinnitsia, Ukraine
Yesterday marked 38 years since my Grandfather Viktor passed away. He was just 61 years old. I am now not that much younger myself. I now have older friends who are older than he ever got to be.
He was an engineer and I think the thoroughness and sense of responsibility for one's actions was a major part of his personality.
I was a teenager when he died. What do I remember? Not all that much, on a conscious level. I remember him teaching me how to drive a car on unpaved roads through the woods in the countryside in Ukraine. I remember him explaining basic engineering concepts to me. I was his only grandchild born during his life and he loved me - and, being young and self-centered like so many teenagers, I didn't quite value it as much as I should have. But I still, and forever, value some of the things he had taught me.
I value an engineer's approach to problem solving. Some of it is reflected in articles that I write. For years I was a bit put off by the unemotional and dry nature of pure practicality and empirical analysis but then eventually I came to think that it is this sort of analysis that dictates how things actually work and hence ethics and preferences need to fit empirical reality, not the other way around. Perhaps Grandpa's approach to life helped me form this worldview.
Grandpa was outwardly a joyous person who I think held a lot of anguish and sadness inside. He had lived through some of the worst periods of the Soviet era and that affected - and, likely shortened - his life. He was almost 18 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Due to his poor eyesight he was not drafted into the military but experienced privation, including starvation, during the war. A deeply conscientious person, I think he suffered from the corruption and lies of the totalitarian system around him. By the time he was my age, in his early fifties, he had suffered his first heart attack. His health went downhill from that point on and ended up in death at 61. This sort of fate is not so unusual for totalitarian societies. And his fate is part of motivation for me to work towards bringing forth better understanding and spirituality to the world that may serve as a bulwark against a system based on oppression, lies and mindlessness.
I am not sure what the meaning of life is. But I hope what he had taught me had made my life more meaningful. Perhaps I would be able to pass that on to others, some of whom would be here when I am no longer around.