The Big Win
A life well lived, gone but not forgotten
“The purpose of life is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Last week I promised you a Big Win, and now I am delivering on that promise. One of my favorite things in the world is research and learning, and I do it on the daily. I love learning, and I can’t get enough of it.
I can never tell what my brain is going to decide to focus on next, it is like pulling something out of a mystery grab bag. Green Victorian arsenic wallpaper! Cooking carrots! And now add abandoned buildings to the list. OBSESSED.
A few weeks ago, as I was driving down a remote country road, my eye caught the unmistakable glint of ruins slowly dissolving into nature. I am a bloodhound for ruins these days, and I pulled a quick U-turn to do a reconnaissance. What I ended up finding was pure magic.
Not just any ruins my friends, no no.
The most glorious ruins I have encountered to date. A massive mansion, a sweeping front porch, a barn, overgrown gardens, stacked rock walls blending into the hills. It stood an impressive three stories high, and leaked layers of stories out of its cracked windows.
My breath caught in my throat for a second and then I squealed with glee. Carefully balancing on the plank of wood laid over the dissolving porch, I managed to get inside and begin exploring.
I treat these abandoned places with the reverence of religion. I am stepping into someone’s left behind life, and I hold their memories in my hands. Walking from room to room, seeing the scraps and fragments from people I will never meet, piecing together what I can, I cobble together scrapbooks to them in my mind.
Every place tells a story, and today I am going to tell you the story of the 17-room mansion.
The papers left behind, the pill bottles and essays, gave me the name of the couple that owned it, Jeff and Amy. These are not their real names, as their story is so unique that simply saying their first names along with the details of their lives would be a fairly easy internet search and it is probably best not to point a big online arrow in the direction of this location.
Jeff was an aeronautical engineer who worked on the lunar landing. His resume is too distinctive for me to say more than that, but at some point, with a life well lived, stacked full of successes, he and the wife took their Catholic level of children (seven in total!) and buggered off to the deep country to live in a mansion.
Even with the roof and floors collapsed in, I could still see the plush elegance of its bones.
Bedrooms, sewing rooms, parlors, kid’s playrooms, two kitchens, three bathrooms, two featuring antique clawfoot tubs, velvet wallpaper, wainscotting, stairs snaking through the sprawling maze, it was a showpiece of a place in its prime.
Jeff was a winner, and he was able to create a space for his large brood of offspring to reach adulthood. Were the children bored in their lush surroundings? Did they look past the velvet wallpaper into the endless green countryside and yearn for something else? Did they rattle through the countless rooms and tell themselves they would trade less mansion for city living?
Maybe. Quite possibly. Not to mention maintaining massive mansions is an expensive proposition, and it does not appear, based on the research I have done, that any of the seven ended up being the equivalent of an aeronautical engineer working with NASA. Having a high achieving parent can be a fair amount of pressure, and the children do not always pick the same path.
The children had children, and by the time I had traced Jeff’s family to the third generation, he had a dizzying number of grandchildren. Jeff died peacefully, according to his obituary, in his 80s in a Veterans House, and the mansion was left to slowly dissolve, year after year, as nature did her inevitable reclaiming.
A house is a living thing, fueled by the people inside it. The humming heartbeat of the house pushes nature back on the daily. The electricity, the heat flowing through, the endless repairs, the snow and rain fought, the yardwork done are all part of the lifelong battle. The second you down tools, she starts to win.
For whatever reason, the house was not sold off. Perhaps there were repairs that were too significant, maybe the house was so deeply remote in the country that no buyers wanted to take it on, maybe there were inheritance disputes…I will never know.
What I do know is that I spent a delightful day exploring the place and the last three weeks learning as much as I could about Jeff and his life. Happy Father’s Day Jeff, here is to a life well lived. I have never met you, but I will never forget you.
A wonderful, fantastic, and deeply empathetic piece of writing. I like it very much, and I especially appreciate the empathy you’ve brought to it.
Yes, a house is a stage for our lives. A framework. We furnish it. We maintain it. We fight a ceaseless battle—day in, day out, hour by hour—to keep nature from reclaiming it.
Our boundaries—the place we have created—are merely artificial. A fleeting moment. Transitory.
Yet the stage is not just a place where the actor performs their story; the stage itself becomes a story about the actor.
It bears witness to their life’s work, even long after the actor has departed.
Until that place returns to nature—merging back into the flow of life—leaving behind only the stories held in our hearts and the hearts of those who come after us. Just as Jeff lives on in your heart as a memory, even though you never met—and never will meet—in the flesh.
Empathy is magic. It allows us to transcend time and space. It lets us feel and come to know people we have never met in reality, and never will. Yet, they are there.
But regarding Jeff and his wife:
Jeff was a very successful man. Truly successful.
Not because he owned a large house. Not because he was wealthy.
But because each of his children was free to choose and live their own life.
The house and the wealth never became a prison.
*That* is the true success of Jeff and his wife. (She certainly played an equal part in that success.)
*That* is the true success of people who lead a genuinely successful life:
Living one’s own life while granting others the freedom to live and flourish in their own way.
This text reminds me of a small house on an island off the coast where I live.
A house that tells the life story of a person—a story so incredible that their descendants didn't believe it until it was historically proven.
Old houses and ruins can hold pure magic. They preserve the most incredible life stories, much like books. Empathy, curiosity, and the work of research allow them to speak—to tell us about truly remarkable people—and bring them back to life for us.
A wonderful, sensitive account with beautiful photos. This text moved me deeply; thank you very much for it.
I am also an explorer of ruins and the ONLY way to visit these places is with reverence for the living done in them. It is also a religious experience for me, or as near to one as I ever have. Thank you.