Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  So much for that. I have heard from Con that you probably cannot go to Maine because the doctors are trying out new drugs on you and want to see how they work. I am terribly sorry because I know how much Maine always meant to me and how much it means to you. But perhaps it is too soon after your time in the hospital to travel and try a new place and be separated from your doctors. (I am grateful they are so conscientious and careful.) These things sometimes take a while to get under control. It took months before the doctors got Charles’s virus under control and by then he had lost a lot of weight and gone down in his blood count, which I feel was a cause of his catching shingles. He is now much better and the outward signs of shingles have disappeared though he still has the chest pains from time to time. However, it is disappearing and he is now gaining back weight, thank goodness.

  We are on our way to the ranch in Montana for a ten-day visit with Land. We had planned to stop on our way back from Maui but our time in Maui was prolonged—to let Charles recuperate, for one thing—so we couldn’t stop in the early spring.

  I will telephone you when I get back, before I go to Switzerland (in early July). I do hope all goes well for you and Nancy. All your children seem to be getting on fine. I hope to see Connie when I get back. Much love to you and Nancy.

  Anne

  [Switzerland]

  July 22nd, 1973

  Dearest Con,

  Your letter—the last letter from North Haven—came yesterday. How you managed to write it these last days and in the midst of a houseful of guests, children, and bad weather, is a miracle! I was very grateful for it, particularly, of course, because you gave first reactions to the reading of the introduction and the inserts from Volume III, which I knew would be painful and difficult and I had worried about.

  As for your objection to the term “anachronism” [to refer] to Next Day Hill, I do think you are, in a way, right. My reaction certainly was—and is—subjective. I was not happy in that house in that period and was also influenced by CAL’s discomfort. But I agree with you that I give the wrong impression and I think it will be easy to modify. I do think Next Day Hill was an anachronism, as all those big houses were: the Lamonts, the Davisons, the Guggenheims, the Pratts, etc. All soon to become museums, institutes, embassies, schools, etc. But my phrase suggests an empty form clanking on mechanically and uselessly, and that is the wrong impression. I will change it. I am grateful to you for bringing it up.

  I am glad this year’s July has been easier than last year’s. This fact alone also cheered me. Charles has now been here a week and though I think he was very happy to come and to find it “just as he left it last year” (flowerpots on the balcony and larks singing in the mornings, cow bells clanging at night, cats coming to the balcony each evening, and fires for supper), it is very different from other summers and chiefly because he is not yet really well. He says he is “much better” and perhaps he is, but he still holds his arm stiff against his chest and does not want to do much. We have not walked—even down to the laiterie for the milk.

  This slow recovery (he has had struggles since late February) has really totally changed the pattern of our lives. He has been better in adjusting to it than I. He has found much constructive work to do in a sedentary life and he carries on all the essential contacts (Pan Am meetings, etc.). But there isn’t any extra. The trips away (to the Philippines, Africa, etc.) that gave him so much freedom and stimulus and adventure, and which are so creative for him, will not be possible in the near future—if ever (I don’t know, of course). This virtually isolates me from the people I used to see when he went off—people he wasn’t particularly interested in. And, at the moment, to see people with him here would be an extra burden to him (as well as to me).

  Since I now have more energy than he, I find myself running twice as fast. Partly to spare him—trying to take more of the lifting, carrying, standing, running, etc. Partly because all that energy is bottled up in me—and that isolation, so that I tend to tear off to shop, do errands, see people I don’t care too much about, dig in the garden, take walks, as an escape, I suppose. I’m not sure this is helpful for him—or constructive, even for me.

  What I have to face is a new and different unbalance in our relationship and in our life. And I must somehow learn how to right it—not to make it perfect but to make it at least workable, so that I am not either exhausted, or so frustrated that I lose my temper over minor and unrelated details, or so depressed because of the apparent monotony or sense of imprisonment that I draw into my shell and give up.

  Of course, it isn’t really this desperate—only difficult. Good weather would help, and ever since he arrived it has been, in your wonderful phrase, “dungeon weather”: damp, cold and rainy. So no breakfasts on the balcony, no casual sitting in the sun.

  He is going to a meeting tomorrow and I am having the two weavers for supper. (But since I never know when he is going off, this is always a hit-or-miss last-minute thing.) I sound very gloomy and I’m not, really. I’m analyzing (one is gloomy before one sees well enough to analyze). Too bad we can’t have a good “bathroom talk.” Perhaps in Maine? So much love and thank you—

  Anne

  Friday, July 27th, 1973

  Dearest Margot,

  Your letter of July 21st has just arrived, brought to me—along with bills, packages, etc.—by the little postman knocking at the chalet door. It took a week to get here and I am writing right back.

  From Dana’s brief note I had no idea how serious John’s accident was, how much pain it involved and how long it would take him to recuperate. I don’t know that I can say anything very helpful but I have been thinking about you a great deal—as if I knew you were undergoing a great strain—writing letters to you in my mind when I couldn’t sleep.

  I have thought about you, Con and myself because I think we are all facing—or have faced or will face—somewhat the same situation. I have only been able to look at it lately, having let down, in the three weeks I’ve been here, from the compulsive (and real) activity and anxiety of this year. Also C. has gone off for a few days, to Frankfurt for IUCN,* which is very good for him and will stimulate and refresh him. He has missed his trips away. That gives me a chance to see to the bottom of my malaise of these past months without being pulled off center by my feelings toward him—or vice versa.

  It is a great help to be able to get to the bottom of it (or near the bottom!). Better still would be to talk to you about it, but since that’s out of the question, I will try to write. I think the first thing one must do is to face the fact that you and I and Con are approaching a period when our husbands are beginning, at least from time to time, to suffer those “diminishments” that Père Teilhard† talks about, accidents or illness, diminishments of strength, power, activities, that inevitably come to most people with aging. Unless one is a saint (and Père Teilhard was a kind of saint), it is difficult to accept the forces of diminishment “as a means of uniting oneself with God.” In any case, he was speaking in his beautiful prayers (in The Divine Milieu) chiefly of himself. It is hard to accept the diminishments of others. (Pain and accidents are also in a somewhat different class. One feels they are unwarranted and must be abbreviated. Often they can be. Healing can take place, whereas aging is incurable.)

  It is probably better that diminishments come earlier (if one has, as is usually the case, married someone older than oneself) to the husband, because women are more intuitively and naturally mothers and healers. But this is only the most obvious aspect of the matter; there are so many complicated elements in being constantly “mother” or “healer” to a grown man. It is actually a total reversal in one’s relationship. And then, since one does not find in oneself always the appropriate emotions, one immediately feels great guilt at being unable to alleviate the pain, cure the illness, or even be constantly compassionate. Worse than the lacks are those odd alien and inexpressible emotions of impatience, rebellion, frustration and a kind of totally irrational excess of energy called for
th by what? I can only guess a kind of animal reaction against illness itself? I think this is what ECM felt and I am not sure it was entirely unhealthy. It made her hope and fight. An outlet for the frustration? An impatience at the passivity of one’s role? A last fling of activity before the diminishments set in on oneself? Perhaps all of these. So you, if you feel these emotions, are not abnormal. I am not sure that there is not an element of healthy resistance in some of these emotions. They can engender hope, action, and a way out—if one can channel them correctly.

  The worst and most destructive element is the guilt, and it is this one has to attack first. It is not your fault that you are well and he is ill, that you are strong while he is weak, etc. And there’s only a limited amount you can do and you can do it better if you are free of guilt and remorse. I think one has to realize that the ill person is “given” by nature a kind of acceptance of the weakness that makes it easier for him to bear or at least to tolerate his illness and his passivity. You, watching with your full powers, are not given any anodyne and feel, in sympathy, the full extent of the blows he is suffering. Hence more anguish and guilt.

  And, to come back to the reversal of relationship, remember, it has taken us years to adjust ourselves (I feel I have barely, if ever, gotten there) to a certain marital relationship based on equality of strength, or even a somewhat or sometimes daughter-father relationship where we look up to the man for strength and steadiness, comfort, etc. Now, suddenly, we lose our “father” again—or our strong companion—and are given, instead, another child! (I exaggerate, but you see the elements better that way.) To adapt to and understand deeply this change is a major undertaking. Don’t be too hard on yourself if the course is not smooth; you are “rowing against wind and tide.”

  I also perceive—which one might have guessed—that the reversal of this core relationship has many ramifications in all one’s other relationships. One is cut off, one is isolated, one is alone. It is almost impossible to maintain other relationships outside of the core one at this juncture, and one needs others—to live, to breathe, to grow, and to bring some kind of new life and air into the central relationship.

  I know you know far more than I about the peace and strength and insight to be found in meditation—so I don’t write about that.

  Much much love to you, dear Margot, and love to John (I wish him well).

  Anne

  Switzerland

  August 13th [1973]

  Dear C.,

  I have hoped you would turn up every day for two weeks and now I hope you won’t come until after I get back from my weekend with Scott in Strasbourg (expect to be back Monday night or Tuesday midday). I may be reached Monday c/o Dr. Stahl (Dana’s friend whom he is visiting in a nearby town. Tel 08-9259).

  I hope you will not disappear again before I get back! Please water the flowers and feed the birds and the black and white cat who comes every night between eight and nine for scraps—quite tame—see you soon!

  Love—

  A.

  December 3rd, 1973

  Dearest Ansy,

  Your father has just come back from Europe with his word, from having talked to you, of M. Feydy’s death “from a clot.” As a result of the operation, I assume. Terrible as the shock is for everybody, the finality does not have the horror of the possibilities for suffering—for everybody—of your last letter’s news (just after the operation, when no one had been told but the children what the operation revealed).

  This will be no comfort for the grief of Mme Feydy, but at least she will not have to watch her husband suffer for months and waste away, and have to keep up a pretense that he is getting better. I am afraid you are all due for a long, hard, gloomy winter but the children will help you to get through it. And perhaps you and Hélène can help each other.

  I will, of course, write Mme Feydy, but it always seems to me people write too soon—when everything is in confusion and there is so much to be done—and it is all you can do to keep going. When the letters keep pouring in so glibly, one sometimes feels outsiders accept too quickly and easily the death of someone who was so close to you that you can’t yet believe they are dead.

  I have just found a small female dog—housebroken—for Aunt Edith*—and I hope she will accept the reality of it (she likes the idea!). Sometimes people don’t really want to be helped. They prefer to go on feeling miserable (she is very lonely). And you must just let them, and not make them conform to your idea of happiness (“Don’t you want to sit with your feet up, dear?”)!

  I am letting Mrs. Saunders take this out to mail with the two envelopes for Charles and Constance—Will write again—

  XO

  Mother

  Argonauta, Maui

  February 10th, 1974

  Dear Stephen [Mitchell],

  I am appalled at the way time has gone by since you were in Switzerland last summer and I said I would write you about the Hermann Hesse book you gave me. It is true I have been carrying around your letters: the nice one from the Rhône Valley mountains with the charming poem to the little son of your host and hostess; and the one—with book—that met me when I got back; and the Dogen† essay on the realization of truth for months now, intending to answer them and carrying on a kind of mental dialogue with you.

  I like the Dogen very much. I had read it before, but it was good to read again, especially at this period of life when so many of my older friends are dying or about to die. One tries to understand it, and accept it without shock or feeling that it is an accident, or an end, or something final. I like particularly the paragraph about firewood turning to ash: “firewood is at the stage of firewood—ash is at the stage of ash,” etc., and “Life is a period of itself; death is a period of itself. They are like winter and spring. We do not call winter the future spring, nor spring the future summer.”

  I am glad things are going well for you and am sure you will find what you are looking for “inside.”

  I also thought of you when I visited Regina Laudis again in November, taking a friend of mine, a Swiss sister of a Protestant community near Neufchâtel, to see it. Her community is a good deal freer than Regina Laudis; I thought they might not want her to talk freely to their community. However she did talk to the whole community (through the grill—which shocked her) who were terribly interested. Mother Jerome in particular found her sympathetic.

  This same sister, Soeur Yvonne, also came with me to our reading discussion and meditation group and met a member of the San Francisco Zen Center, Yvonne Rand (now an ordained—what? monk?), a very interesting and free and enlightened young woman I like very much. She also was impressed with the Swiss “Soeur Yvonne.” (“What she is—is impressive,” she said.) Odd, how all these lives converge.

  As for my outer life: my husband came home at the end of the summer quite ill with some virulent bug which we now think may have been a form of typhoid. I couldn’t get a doctor to come to the chalet and was about to bundle him up and take him by Volkswagen to a hospital, when he decided to doctor himself with some antibiotics he had been given on a Pan American flight when he had paratyphoid! Even so, it took him a month to get well.

  Yvonne Rand told us that Suzuki Roshi used to say that we (Americans) moved around too much. I certainly feel that way myself. My husband seems to find roots in movement and perhaps that is more in accord with life. I would like to be more rooted in some land. Not Hawaii, which seems to me a rootless, touristy place. New England or Switzerland could hold my roots better.

  I seem to be fine and it is good to be quiet and alone for a while. This is certainly a long and wandering letter. I must go out now and try to swim or walk the black beach, before the sun goes down.

  I hope the poetry in you is just running underground and will fountain again before long—with my love and thoughts and apologies!

  Anne

  [In the winter of 1974, Charles Lindbergh’s health deteriorated rapidly. In June of that year, he was admitted to the Harkness Pavilion at Colum
bia-Presbyterian Medical Center, and his children were told that he had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer two years earlier. He had forbidden his wife to tell anyone, including family members, about his diagnosis and treatments.

  In late July, Charles and Anne were informed that nothing further could be done for him, and that he had only weeks to live. Charles told his wife that he wished to spend his last days in Maui. Against the advice of most of his doctors, who feared their patient would die en route, Anne called upon her family and friends. With the support of Jon, Land, Scott, Dana Atchley, Dr. Milton Howell* and John Hanchett† of Maui, Sam Pryor, and United Airlines, Charles was taken to Maui, where he lived out his remaining days in the company of his wife and three sons in the Pechins’ guest house on the Hana coast, not far from Dr. Howell’s clinic. Ansy and Reeve stayed in touch by telephone.

  Charles Lindbergh died early in the morning on August 26, 1974, with Anne and Land at his bedside.]

  Tellina,‡ Darien, Connecticut

  September 22nd, 1974

  with Spirit of St. L§

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pechin,

  You must be back in Hana now, looking at that beautiful coastline that is now engraved in my mind from our week there. I wish there were some way of my telling you what your generosity in letting us use your guest cottage meant to my husband, to the boys, and to me, and to every member of my family—even those who were not there, who have shared with us (by letter or in talk) the experience of that week before my husband died.