“If it is to be, it is up to me.”

“If it is to be, it is up to me.” is the self-reliance maxim Gladys Johnson taught her grandson, Erik LaGrange. The book gives it practical weight rather than presenting it as a general slogan: Erik recalls it while injured on a mountain, where his next step is to get himself down safely.

Meaning and Source

The sentence turns the possibility of a desired outcome into a personal responsibility. Its compact, balanced phrasing makes the lesson easy to remember, but the surrounding narrative grounds it in Gladys’s conduct. She taught self-reliance by example, meeting family crises through work, travel, and care rather than complaint.

After her husband returned from the Battle of the Bulge crippled and broken, Gladys found work as a grocery-store clerk and supported him and their daughter. When a doctor said the VA hospital in Tucson, Arizona, offered him the best chance of recovery, she packed the family’s belongings into a 1953 pickup and a flimsy trailer and drove them there. Later, after their daughter died of cancer at twenty-five, Gladys took in the six-month-old Erik when his grieving father said he could not raise the baby. These episodes give the maxim its context: self-reliance is shown as sustained responsibility for others as well as for oneself.

Erik’s Recollection on the Mountain

Erik recalls the saying after a fall on a steep mountainside. Loose rock gives way beneath his foot, twisting his right ankle; he slides into mesquite, whose roots hold him, and is left with bloody scratches on his face, hands, and arms. As the ankle swells, he loosens his boot but keeps it on because he believes he can hobble down the trail only while wearing it.

The immediate choice is whether to summon help. Erik does not use his cell phone, remembering Gladys’s instruction not to call too soon and to wait until help is truly needed. He tells himself to get up and start down the mountain, then recalls the maxim. The saying functions here as a prompt to act within his limits: his injured ankle makes the descent difficult, but he judges that he can still attempt it.

Narrative Function

The maxim links Gladys’s past actions to Erik’s present decision. The narrative first establishes the ethic through concrete family hardships, then returns to it at a moment when Erik must decide what he can manage for himself. His recollection is not simply an inheritance of words; it connects his grandmother’s demonstrated persistence with his own response to danger.

The mountain scene also gives the principle a boundary. Erik does not treat self-reliance as a refusal of assistance under every circumstance: Gladys’s remembered instruction is to wait until help is genuinely needed. In the scene, he assesses his injury, keeps the boot on, and chooses to descend. The maxim’s significance rests in that measured decision, where responsibility means neither passivity nor pretending that the danger is absent.