My grandfather painted his furniture gold. I never understood it. It turns out I wasn’t supposed to.
My grandmother’s house was a lot of things.
Red carpet. Gold couches. Plastic on the gold couches, the kind that stuck to the back of your legs in the summer when you were wearing shorts. My brother and I despised those couches with every fiber of our being. There were also marble tables everywhere. I know this because both my brother and I cracked our heads open on them at separate points in our childhood. He was wearing a Fonzie shirt that said “Aaaaaaaaa” when it happened to him. I wish I were making that up.
It was French provincial. It was gaudy. It was a lot. And it was entirely, completely hers.
My grandfather had his own thing going on. He drove a Cadillac and he had taken the time to affix his initials in small gold letters on both doors. On the hood sat what he called a police dog, a German Shepherd hood ornament. And throughout the house, on the ornate carved wood of their bedroom furniture, he had carefully painted the decorative trim. In gold.
I never understood it. Not once.
What I understand now is this.
My grandmother cared deeply about how things looked. Her home, her furniture, her appearance. She dressed to the nines every single day, purse matched to her dress, not a hair out of place. Keeping the plastic on those couches was pride. It was her way of saying: these things matter to me, and I will take care of them.
My grandfather was an ornamenter. He took plain things and made them his. His initials on the Cadillac. Gold paint in the wood carvings. A German Shepherd on the hood because why not. He was signing them. Claiming them. Saying something about who he was that he may not have had the words for.
I did not have to understand it. It was never mine to understand.
It was theirs.
I think about this nearly every day now.
I think about it when a daughter tells me she does not understand why her mother keeps folding and refolding the same dish towel. I think about it when a father cannot fathom why his sixteen-year-old cares so much about something that seems to matter so little. I think about it when someone tells me their husband still gets up at five on a Saturday when nobody on earth is making him.
We spend so much energy trying to decode the people we love. Why do they do that. Why does that matter to them. Why can’t they just.
But understanding was never the assignment.
Honor it. Don’t decode it.
That is the tool. Four words. You can carry it out of here today.
It matters most when someone is losing things. Meaning and purpose do not disappear with a diagnosis, or with age, or with a hard year. They go quiet. They change shape. They need someone willing to help find them again.
If your person once loved to paint, we may not be able to hand them a canvas and walk away. But we can put a brush in their hand and sit down beside them. If they always cared about how they looked, helping them choose an outfit is everything. It is the whole person, still in there, still theirs.
You do not have to understand why something mattered to them. You only have to honor that it did.
Somewhere in your life right now there is a person doing something you do not understand. A ritual, a habit, a thing they care about far more than seems reasonable.
This week, try this. Skip the why. Why sounds like a challenge, and people defend themselves against it.
Ask them to tell you about it instead.
Then listen to what comes out. It is almost never about the thing.
My grandmother’s plastic couch covers were never for me. They were very much for her.
And that was always enough.