By Brian Klaas
ESSAY
On June 15, 1905 Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John and Theodore in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.
There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognisable etching from a forgotten past.
When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliche, but true, to say you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.
But that’s also true for your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, stretching back millennia. Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a sabre-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of apes more than six million years ago.
Trace the human lineage back hundreds of millions of years and all our fates hinge on a single wormlike creature that avoided being squished. If those precise chains of creatures and couples hadn’t survived, lived, and loved just the way that they did, other people might exist, but you wouldn’t. We are the surviving barbs of a chain-link past.
The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.
When I was 20 years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline ‘Terrible Act of Insane Woman’, and reveale
