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Generally the passing of a retired chemical engineer wouldn’t make a dent in the national news cycle.
But Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who died May 25, was no ordinary citizen. He was the last surviving grandson of John Tyler.
Yes, that John Tyler – the man who became America’s 10th president 184 years ago. Tyler was born in 1790, during the first term of George Washington. And he died in 1862, during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
Neither of those details is particularly noteworthy. Historians, in fact, have never considered Tyler (who served from 1841 to 1845) one of the brighter lights in America’s presidential chandelier.
But what no one saw coming is that two of John Tyler’s grandsons would still be alive when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
At first blush, that seems impossible. How can a man who was born in the 18th century and who died in the middle of the 19th century have living grandchildren two decades into the 21st century?
As you might guess, the dominoes of Tyler’s life had to fall in just the right way. And they did.
A couple of cultural factors helped make it happen. It wasn’t uncommon in the 1800’s for men (especially widowers) to marry women many decades their junior. And it wasn’t unusual for couples to produce a lot of kids.
Tyler fathered 15 children, a presidential record unlikely ever to be broken (especially since Elon Musk, father of at least 14 kids, is a native South African and therefore ineligible for America’s highest office). Tyler had eight children with his first wife Letitia and seven more with his second wife Julia, whom he married two years after Letitia’s death. At the time of their marriage, Julia was 30 years younger than Tyler.
Those circumstances alone would be enough to propel the president’s progeny into the 20th century. But then one of Tyler’s sons repeated his dad’s pattern.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), the president’s 13th child, had three children with his first wife Anne. Not long after her death, the nearly 70-year-old Lyon married a 35-year-old woman named Sue, with whom he had three more kids.
The first of that trio died in infancy. But the second two – Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. (born 1924) and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928) – just kept adding candles to their birthday cakes. Lyon left us in 2020 at the age of 95, while Harrison died a week ago yesterday at 96.
Everything had to happen exactly right to produce those extraordinary happenings.
When you think about it, some pretty incredible things also had to happen for you to be reading this reflection today.
Your great-grandparents had to make it out of childhood alive, something hardly guaranteed even 100 years ago. Your grandparents on both sides had to meet. They had to have a second date that was promising enough to allow them to fall in love.
Those who came before you had to survive the Flu Pandemic of 1918, the scourge of polio, the Great Depression, and the possibility of becoming a casualty in one of America’s wars.
Against all odds, you had to win the most important competitive event of your life, the one in which half your genetic material outraced at least 10 million other sperm.
Your mother had to decide to bring you into the world. Your birth parents or adoptive parents had to embrace the challenge of feeding you, loving you, and carrying you at 3 am while you were sick, even though you had little to offer at such moments except the hope and expectation that one day you would become an adult who could offer love and care to others, too.
All those things had to happen. And they did.
Which is why you are here.
The Hebrew psalmists were pretty sure there was more to the story. “In your book [O Lord] were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them yet existed” (Psalm 139:16).
God, in other words, is the ultimate author of our stories. He is the superintendent of the details of our lives – moments both big and small – and the turning points no one else can see coming.
“I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 29:11).
Those plans may not include grandchildren who will be carrying on our legacies two centuries from now.
But they are remarkable enough to give every one of us grounds to say, every morning, “Thank you, Father, for the privilege of waking up one more time in your good creation.”