What’s being happy

Jean and I had dipped into the subject of happiness after an impassioned discussion regarding the gray state, where elderly women living alone, who worked in low-income jobs, end up. Summing up their perceived condition, she and I opined, “unhappy,” as the simplest but truest description of their seeming solitary lives, insulated by hue-less walls, where dinner would be but scraped from cans or thawed from a week or more since the last trip to the supermarket. 

Yet, interviewing them for an anthology of their “true lives,” for WE*ACT (in hiatus), then the organization where we belonged, they seemed happy. Asked why, they mentioned occasional walks to the grocery, regular coffee with a round of bridge at the community centre where they would chat with other members, create rag dolls or knit children’s toques for the center’s Fall bazaar, and, if lucky, join escorted trips beyond Lion’s Gate or past the Fraser River boundaries and have gourmet lunch at a bayside restaurant.

Surviving body weaknesses paired with ageing, about which they hardly complained, they cited how these had seemed paltry compared to the ordeals of their childhood during World War I, when death raced them into bomb shelters, or through the Black Forest— woods so dense that the sun couldn’t penetrate the thick pine trees—running and losing a shoe, eating nothing but old bread and hard cheese.

Eyes sparkled, though, from recalling one’s first try to be a singer or an actress, (one even blushed, confessing to have had a crush on a young German soldier), as well, dreams of climbing the Himalayas or wandering through some esoteric kingdom, sailing on a yacht and most of all, meeting Prince Charming. But for most, the dreams had remained but fluff, and the Prince turned out worst than a “scarecrow without bone or muscle, and only feigning power.”

Still, some locked the fluff in their heart, which like Anya, would caress once in a while, even as of their unmasked prince, they overcame and had moved on, shouldering their children’s future with part-time jobs they summarized as, “you name it, I’ve done it.”

Neither income security nor pension weighed in in those jobs, such as a saleslady or clerk in a store, and in a hotel as linen or cleaning lady. Yet, as seasons changed, Hilda, recalled, “my children just grew, too, bursting like flowers,” though she had forgotten details of how she balanced her meager income and their needs.

I had asked Jean, as we continued to mull over their lives, what’s missing then, in the kind of happiness they seemed to have found. She responded as I had expected, “social involvement,” which draws out the self to help fulfill in others a need while fortifying one’s own strength. I argued her point, using my grandmother, who had none, as reference.

Widowed during the Second World War with nine children, she had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to be involved outside of her home, as she dealt with a fractured, once comfortable life, which with her husband’s execution, barred her and her brood from ever going back. Her life and identity, to the end, lay in her children’s, and later, each grandchild’s, on whose birth she would move house to care.

Jean picked up on that last phrase, bending it to mean “involvement” beyond the self obliquely, without verbalizing as lacking in the lives of our anthology interviewees. I rejoined picking up on the social factor, saying that my grandmother’s life in others, quite common among Filipinos, has been encoded by culture and tradition, but which among our Canadian subjects didn’t figure as prominently in their lives. But did it matter?

In the end, we agreed that happiness must exist beyond measuring sticks, where it finds essence elsewhere. Indeed, how could a government of apparently happy people, like say, the Filipinos, be blamed for insouciance in handling social issues?