Shortly after his mother’s death, my husband found a list inside one of her favorite books. It was “The Way of Zen” by Alan W. Watts. The list — evidently written in the midst of pre-Christmas planning — reads:
Wrapping paper
Christmas napkins, plates
Gayle’s chocolates?
Iron
Wild rice chicken casserole
Brussels sprouts
Small salad
Lin Yutang/Lieh Tzu Sasaki
I Ching—Book of Changes
Chuang-Tzu
Joseph Needham
H.A. Giles
Perhaps you’ve never seen holiday menus and Chinese philosophers included in the same list. That’s because you never met my mother-in-law.
Joan Howes was a housewife-philosopher. Planning a dinner menu for her family and exploring the great Taoist thinkers — all in the same afternoon — posed no contradiction for her. Jo raised six children and managed a home while living the examined life. She believed in what art critic Arthur C. Danto calls “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.”
In Jo’s view of life, there was very little gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary. She found beauty in the everyday; for example, stopping to remark during a birthday gathering “Isn’t this an amazing family?”
Special times were wrought from the daily living, and each moment could become a memory. Her life was not easy or simple, but she managed to keep the long view of life and its vicissitudes while appreciating its good times.
“Will it really matter in a hundred years?” was her response to fretting. It’s an attitude I am trying to emulate.
Jo learned her philosophical detachment the hard way. She was a college student when her mother fell ill with cancer. Jo quit school to nurse her through her last months. “It was the only option I could live with,” is how she explained this sacrifice. She had lost her older brother in a submarine in World War II’s Pacific theater only a few years before.
Jo would have had every excuse to bemoan fate’s cruelty or feel sorry for herself. Instead, she adopted her mother’s view: “No matter how bad you have it, there’s always someone twice as bad off.”
My mother-in-law’s perspective also involved humor. One evening during his teenage years when my husband announced he was visiting his girlfriend, she asked if her parents were home.
When her son answered “No,don’t you trust me, Mom?” she replied with a smile “I trust you — I just know you’re human.”
I’m not claiming Jo was a saint. She spoke her mind plainly and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Her last years were marred by emphysema and her husband’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease. Jo’s patience sometimes wore thin, and her philosophical detachment was tested. But if saints are defined by their fortitude, by their endurance through pain, by keeping the faith in spite of suffering, and by providing an example to those they leave behind, then maybe Jo was a saint.
I once heard Jo Howes, in the midst of a discussion of women’s role in the workplace, refer to her children as “my resume.” These six remarkable people, raised with her vital spirit, are truly her labor of love, her living, breathing, curriculum vitae. Housewife philosophers raise extraordinary children. Thank you, Jo, for your legacy.
