To my husband, it meant carrying out his last wish: “to go home to Maui.” To us—my sons and I—who were privileged to share it with him, it meant a chance for an intimacy in his life, his thoughts, his feelings, that we never could have had if he had been in a hospital.
I hope you do not feel that the beautiful guest cottage is marked with tragedy because of the experience. Of course it is a deep sadness to lose a husband—or a father—but for him it was a kind of triumph. He was so happy and at peace to be there, to hear the waves and the birds and to have his family about him. For us it will always be one of the richest and deepest experiences of our lives. And I feel this kind of blessing will go down through the families of all our children into the lives of our grandchildren, who will be stronger to face life and death because of it! I am grateful to all of Hana and Kipahulu—all of Maui, in a sense—for the outpouring of love and help and sympathy that surrounded us there. But the core of it seems to me expressed in that beautiful little cottage and your great kindness in letting us use it.
I am now back in a world very different from Hana—in the rush and pressure of many duties and demands and the complications of “settling an estate” and finding a new life alone—but I hope when things are in somewhat better order, I can find something from our life together—Charles’s and my life—that can go to your life there, as a more personal and tangible expression of our gratitude.
I think our first meeting was on the David Grays’ porch in Kipahulu. I will look forward to meeting you again when I return to Maui, this winter sometime, I hope. With my warmest wishes for you and deep gratitude—
Anne Lindbergh
P.S. I want to add a practical note. I have worried about the bills that we could not find out about before we left Hana. My son Land, before we left, called the telephone company and asked if we could obtain the telephone bills for your cottage from August 18th through August 29th. They were very nice but said it was all computerized and they could not pull them out. (The telephone bill will be astronomical!) There will be other bills, too—electric—water?—cleaning? We did speak to Dr. Howell and to John Hanchett about trying to get these—if possible before you arrived home—so you would not be met and faced with a sheaf of unknown bills. However, no bills have up to now reached me. I feel these must be straightened out. In fact, my husband kept insisting that we should pay you rent for the cottage and I would happily do so. I feel much in your debt for your letting us be there. Do let me know what we owe you.
Tellina, Darien, Connecticut
November 11th, 1974
Dear Bill [Jovanovich],
I wanted to send you just a line to thank you for coming out to see me in Darien last week, and to tell you how much it meant to me. It wasn’t just the relief of feeling we saw eye to eye on the technical aspects of Charles’s papers, or even your kindness in taking those requests off my shoulders.*
It was more, I think, simply the release of meeting you again—instead of the public image of Charles or the public consequences of death and loss, [to share] the private image, and so clearly. Many devoted friends of Charles saw only one side of him, but you, I think, perhaps more than any “friend” of the past decade, saw the many-faceted personality (and he perhaps also saw a many-faceted person in you). It may be because of this, among other things, that he felt very close to you and had such confidence in you. These things are—for me—easier to write than to say, hence this note.
I am looking forward to lunch on the 22nd and, though it is a totally unnecessary luxury for me to be picked up by George and taken to town and back, I accept with gratitude—this time! If it turns out that he is needed in the afternoon—or morning—I can easily take a train either way. And, of course, you know that if you find yourself unexpectedly pressed that week, you could always postpone our appointment.
Gratefully,
Anne
As you know, I had a good weekend with Helen and think I can start to do some cutting on my manuscript shortly.
First Year After Death
[From an unfinished manuscript on widowhood]
One is so disoriented, one tries to make a map of grief. But one cannot make a map. Grief is not a place, as C. S. Lewis says, it is a process. I am just at the beginning. It is a journey—a long journey, unmarked and roadless—but other people’s signposts can help.
In the numbness of first grief, nature protects you; the amputated limb does not hurt at first. But everything that one passes through numbly or automatically must be, at some point, relived actively, eyes open, aware, vulnerable. What one goes through under anesthesia, one must suffer painfully and fully later, in some way: in dreams, in images—waking up startled at night to hear in memory the labored breath, to see the emaciated body, to hear the hammer blows of the nails being pounded into the lid of the coffin. (Terrible sound. I realize in my dreams now that he is dead—but somehow not yet buried. I am stopped at that moment.)
The first reaction, the morning he died, was one of gratitude to God that he had been taken—that he was no longer imprisoned in the suffering body, that he did not have to be moved to the hospital to be separated from his family by an oxygen tent and deeper painkillers. This was the first image to work through and one I have not entirely lost.
I have not yet reached the real man I was married to for forty-four years. When I do, I will feel more pain—more sense of loss, vacuum, loneliness—but perhaps a greater sense of him, of who he really was, of his presence now. It is one month since the death. I still cannot see him. I do not dream about him, but wake heavily and painfully, coming up from great depths as if from drowning, dimly aware I am still at a burial service.
Last night I dreamed of someone I hoped was him, an approximation. I rushed to give him the embraces, the arms around him, I could not give to a dying man that last week. But the image was not him. It is still too soon to see him. It would be too painful.
In intense grief, one sees the world as even more beautiful than before although—or perhaps because—seen through tears. But I think the tears are irrelevant. One sees the world as unbearably beautiful because one sees through love. I remember it looked like this when I was young and “in love.” It is love that illumines the world—not grief.
There are so many faces to grief: numbness, apathy, loneliness, panic, anger, resentment. A sense of dust and ashes over everything, except the world of nature, which is still beautiful. But the world—the worldly world—the emptiness of it. People still touch you, but ideas and things, and even books, hardly at all.
Going over the records of the past five years, I think how little he was with me, how much away! The living, of course, always have regrets. Have the dead no regrets? No sense of time wasted?
One moves slowly backwards in time, from the last days to the days before the last, to the days which, for what it was worth (one learns it was not worth much), he felt a little better or ate a little more. Back even to the days when we had some hope—the days when he came back from the hospital—only to go downhill again when he tried to work, when he had to rest three times going upstairs, when he watched me exercise and said, “I couldn’t begin to do that.” Back to the days of discouragement, of realizing he was losing more strength each day. The days of hope are hard to remember and the days of slow realization of growing weakness, harder.
Will I ever get back to the well man—the well memories?
Yes. The rush of time is hurrying him away. I should not be so busy, but everything pushes one on relentlessly.
The sense of numbness alternates with the sense of sharp grief or realization—unbearable, but it brings with it a sense of closeness. “Blessed are they that mourn.” Yes, because it is so difficult to mourn. Those that mourn “shall be healed.” But so little of the time can one mourn. One has had an amputation and one is numb most of the time. One goes on living automatically, out of habit. One is even astonished at what one can do, as in early convalescence from a bad operation. (“See, I can wash m
y face. I can hold a spoon.”) “Look, I can go to the bank. I can drive to Vermont and back. I can meet and talk to people.”
Numbness is hard to bear because it is separation. Mourning is hard to bear because it is pain, but along with pain comes closeness. “Blessed are they that mourn”—who have that closeness.
Disorientation is constant. One is a wavering compass needle. True North has been taken away. Not only direction has gone, but the resistance that allowed one to move in space. It is as if one had been pushing against “something” and the “something” had been taken away; one is put off one’s balance. One staggers forward. Marriage is, of course, a kind of play of forces: a dance, a give and take. Without the countering force, one is left unsteady, hardly able to stand or move. There is a form of boxing—Japanese? Chinese?—that illustrates this. Jujitsu? One is left shadow boxing—that is it.
One is unsteady all the time, off balance. But one knows one must learn over again, from the beginning, how to walk, speak, act alone. I don’t doubt that I will learn, but it will take time. There are things that help: meditation, being out of doors, working in the earth with growing things, some reading (very few things are right: some poetry, some spiritual reading, Teilhard de Chardin), some people, the ones I can be real with.
There are also intolerable things: the worldly world, shops, gossip, worldly people, the unfeeling hurry of city streets, catalogues of clothes, gifts, the mountains of unread mail, and much of the machinery one has to go through in the settling of an estate.
One is burdened with more things than one can possibly do, and with half the strength. This is terribly distracting when one wants, most of all, to be focused. Everything that keeps one from focusing is negative and almost everything one is pressed to do keeps one from focusing. I spend hours trying to find letters, records, files, deeds, stock certificates, without much success. This adds to one’s feeling of disorientation; one flounders in a sea of paperwork, arid and senseless, very separative.
I went up to Reeve’s a week ago. It was a great help to be in Vermont. There was sharp grief at first, being there without him, but closeness, and being indispensable, in a practical down-to-earth way to a daughter, and finding a place, even if temporary, in a warm loving family. And the beauty of walks in the woods, the beauty of autumn—sharp as grief, close as grief—was very healing. I find the wild calls of the geese at twilight also bring me this sense of sharp pain and closeness.
This is “mourning”: these glimpses of pain, grief, loss, plus something else—a closeness or an eternal quality that is sustaining. This is healing.
Now, back at home, on the whole I live fairly steadily and automatically but slowed up by constant weariness; one functions by rote. Most of the time I feel his death is impossible to believe; it is either totally impossible or, in flashes, absolutely intolerable.
Children and grandchildren help. Kristina is coming this weekend, I hope. I love hearing about the children. How enchanting to picture Charles, saying “Little Pig, little Pig won’t you let me come in?”
The funniest condolence phrase I’ve yet struck came in a very nice letter from a lawyer. His letter was human throughout, but when he came to express sympathy or cheer, he lapsed into the language most familiar to him: “It would be an error to extrapolate from the present as a proxy for the balance of the future.”!! Hmmm?!?
“So few people help,” I wrote last week, and it has been proved again. I went to New York just for the afternoon. I stopped at a bookshop to get something to read, and then at the bakery for Italian bread. “You have not been here for so long. You have been away?” “Yes, I have been away.” Out into the street quickly.
“The World” is alien, even my own dear group of New York friends. It was nice to see them at book group, and the silent meditation was good though quivery, not deep. I felt all the antennae. And afterwards, listening to the talk—politics, books, money raising, etc.—I felt again, I inhabit another world. I don’t belong here. I felt silent and out of step. I should not have come.
It was akin to the feeling when one has just had a baby and goes out for the first time. One is weak and feels far too vulnerable, except in the tiny circle of the baby’s cradle, as if one had had a layer of skin peeled off. One is raw to touch. “Where someone lays a finger, it leaves a bruise.”
I must stay in my own small circle, my own quiet country world, where I can follow the tiny round of habitual duties: feed the birds, mulch the bushes, weed, clip the vines. Everything outside helps, but the desk is mountain high in other arid duties I must get through. There are promises to keep, obligations. I always was bad at this. Now I must learn, but it is a new worldly challenge, and one has so little stamina to attack such a burden.
I am back further now, past the grave, into the period of illness, of last summer when he came home and lost strength day by day. I dreamt he was trying to walk on crutches. No, no—I efface that dream. I turn away. I can’t bear it. But it is always veiled, heavily cloaked: I can’t see his face and am only dimly aware it is him.
I wake heavily, unrelieved. Once I woke and found humming in my head an old popular tune from about the time we were married: “I’ll get by as long as I have you.” I can only guess what the dreams are, although sometimes there is a clear one. I dream I am at a party and see someone I think is Charles—his back. I rush toward him and try to throw my arms around him. But the man turns, and it is not Charles but someone else, a caricature of him. I cannot see the real man; perhaps it would destroy me at this point.
This weekend I thought I would try to have a friend, a dear friend, to walk with and have supper with; holiday weekends are so long. But though there were good moments, I found, again, we were in different worlds. She was inhabiting the “real world” of public events, politics, books, etc.—being positive, cheerful, practical—and I was bogged down in some other world far away, like a woman bearing a child or getting up for the first time after: weak, vulnerable, oversensitive, vague and inefficient, disoriented, slow.
Perhaps one is “bearing a child”: the new relationship with death or with the dead person. And one wants to be working only at that; everything else seems irrelevant. No, not my relationship to my own children. That is real. Anything I can do for them or their children is real and constructive and goes “with the grain,” not against it. It gives me focus and orientation.
Other people, however, I can only see sparingly, in little touches, not continuously. Perhaps one could see those who have gone through almost the same thing, but our experiences are so different, even in death, loss, and grief.
Over the weekend I came, for the first time since his death, to my little writing house. It is such an intimate place and full of his care for me. (He kept the stove full of kerosene, put up the blinds last spring, filled the cans, etc.) Also full of my writing self, my alone self. Because I had a guest in the house, I realized, I must come out and be alone even to write a letter, away from the impingement of even a dear friend. After putting down the rugs, filling the stove, and sitting at my desk to write a letter, I realized I must do this each day, even for a short time. It will help me focus.
And after the growing of this child—a new relationship with the dead—will come the growing of the new child that is me without him. I am sure, if I live long enough, this will come. I must and will learn to function alone. A new person will be born. But one has to start at the very beginning: learn to walk again, alone; learn to see, alone; learn to act, to take action, and to live alone.
In the meantime, one must learn to function in a world—several worlds—that are unfamiliar and unreal.
In this sense I have to be him, or carry on his role, which I am unaccustomed to and very unskilled at. And it must be done now, when I am running on half steam: inefficient, tired, distracted. It is difficult to find oneself when one is carrying on another’s role.
At the end of the afternoon I try to do something outside: clip shrubs and vines, transplant begonias to t
he house, water or spread peat moss in the evergreens. This is steadying and I feel more centered, rooted in nature and its cycles, but not really closer to him. That comes only in rare sharp flashes in the evening: hearing the wild geese cry as they come into the cove, or looking out at the stars on a clear night. These are sharp stabs of grief, but bring closeness also. They are a luxury, a few seconds out of the day. Most of the hours are spent completely numb, plodding automatically, unfeeling, as if carrying a heavy unseen weight—a blind, dumb, nameless weight of sorrow which makes everything slow, heavy, wearying.
Yesterday, it poured sheets and waves and long drips of rain all day. It was dark and unrelenting. I was glad for my shrubs and trees that needed it, but it was a hard day to go ahead in, to be constructive. Two people came from the Yale Library to talk to me about his papers and the provisions of the will and its consequences. They were very kind and I think it was clarifying to them and to me. But after they left I was at loose ends, unable to concentrate, as I am much of the time, my powers of focus used up by one effort, by a few hours in the morning usually. If I can work outside in the afternoon I am somewhat relieved, as by sleep, but yesterday it was impossible because of the rain.
Last night I could not sleep until early morning, in this state of—what? Not grief. I was distracted and miserable, both physically and nervously. Unable to rest, I took sleeping pills. I read Chekhov’s letters like a drug, and finally got up and exercised, falling into a heavy unrefreshing sleep in the early morning hours. Perhaps all the nervous tension resulted from the lack of my daily letting down in outdoor work; I must try to keep to a schedule with some outdoor tasks each day.
But this morning I woke to a beautiful fresh rain-washed world. Many leaves have fallen but the rest are golden. I could sit on my overturned rowboat and praise God for the beauty around me, for the cycle of life, and feel part of it again.