Ulysses S. Grant had been through hard times before. He had been busted out of the army. He had struggled with alcoholism. He had been broke and humiliated (pawning, as we talked about recently, ​to pay for Christmas presents​). He had seen war and death and division.

Yet he got through it all.

How? What propelled him from the depths? Kept him going through this hardship? ​It was his love for his family​. “No one, indeed, can understand the character of General Grant,” his aide and researcher Adam Badeu explained, “who does not know the strength of his regard for his children. It was like the passion of a wild beast for its cubs, or the love of a mother for a sucking child, instinctive, unreasoning, overweening; yet, what everyone can appreciate; natural, and in this grim veteran touching in the extreme. He not only thought his sons able, wise, and pure; he had a trust in them that was absolute and childlike.”

It was this love that got Grant through what was, in some ways, his hardest challenge—when all his money was stolen and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After all that struggle, after those incredible triumphs, what was he to do? Leave them with nothing? Give up? No. As Badeu explained, Grant, “rose from his death-bed to work for them, and when he thought he was dying his utterances were about his ‘boys.’ [And] this feeling, lavished on his own children, reached over to theirs [his grandchildren]. No parent ever enveloped his entire progeny in a more comprehensive or closer regard.”

This love is what keeps us going too. It’s what motivates us. It’s what centers us. It humbles and elevates us. It makes us capable of doing incredible things. Grant’s beautiful ​memoirs​—which sold well enough to provide for his family after he left—are one such testament to that. But so are our accomplishments, whether people recognize them as such. They are statements of the regard we have for our children and what we would do for them…which is to say, anything.