I will remember until my death her shriek—a long piercing cry echoing through the house that morning when she went down and found him. And then her screams, “My baby is dead! My baby is dead!” Mme C. and I rushed downstairs. And there he was, turned over, lifeless and estranged, I felt, not the baby we knew. So swiftly does death change a body. The eyes were closed; he died in his sleep. I could only say, “He’s gone. He is not there at all.” Feeling so overwhelmingly that the child, the spirit, had gone, leaving a shell that bore no resemblance to the child we knew. Only the golden hair was his, was alive, was real to touch: smooth, silky gold.
The rest of the morning was a nightmare: the house filled with strangers, the secretaries, the police, the coroner, the ambulance corps—all so gruesomely reminiscent of my baby’s kidnapping. So long ago! I could only say to her, “The horror goes—the pain remains—but the horror will go.”
I do not know how that day passed. Mme C. washed and dressed the baby. I did not see him taken away, but before he was taken, I said I wanted to sit in the room with him and with Reeve, and say a prayer. I remembered how much I minded having CAL’s body rushed out before I could do this. I could only kiss his temple and go out, because he himself had wanted to be taken swiftly from his bed to his grave before the press could know of it and be there.
Reeve was well controlled and talked to the undertaker and arranged to have him sent to Vermont. She talked to Richard and to her minister and arranged for a service in the Peacham church. We called off a lunch in town for Mme C. to meet some editors. People came to the door (kind neighbors) with soups and casseroles. We called Jim in Florida and Dr. R. and Krissie in N.Y. (Reeve called.)
Jim flew up for the night, Krissie came out, and Richard came down from Vermont. We had supper before the fire. That was all quiet and strangely comforting. Ansy came up the next day and we all drove up for the service.
Little House
April 5th, 1985 [DIARY]
Good Friday: a beautiful soft day, sunny and springlike. Hard to associate what “Good Friday” was named for, Christ on the cross. But one can give thanks on such a day: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” I sit on the little blue bench outside my writing house and try to meditate. “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” with the birds interweaving their songs and cries with my breath.
I pick up Louisa* and we drive out to the country swiftly, beating the traffic, eating sandwiches she has fixed ahead of time. We pick up Berwick from Mrs. Swanson, then home and unpack the car. She has brought all kinds of food—apples, brioche, croissants and wine—several bags and books, etc.
We take naps. I feel very tired. After, a brief walk to the Delafield Island causeway, watching the mockingbirds fluttering over us and touching the soft furry buds of the shadblow, not quite in flower, and looking at lowering skies over the marshy flat.
At night, Susan Hoguet† runs in with a quiche she has made for us (very delicious). We sit and eat in front of the fire and I talk about the death of Jonathan. She also talks to me about how I shall manage my old age. She is quite practical and kind and knows me well. She thinks it will kill me to move to Washington. She is going to a retirement home; I couldn’t bear to. We are all in the same boat.
I feel, in fact, very old and tired—just this winter. One grows old in jerks. I did not feel old last summer—tired often, but not old—when I had Reeve and the children and Jonathan and Richard in my chalet, because I felt useful and because there seemed to be a future to look forward to. Jonathan took the future with him. Of course, there is still the present. There is Kristina and Bob’s baby, Anna, a great joy. Anything I can do for them is a joy. Bob’s catastrophic accident last summer body-surfing, which led to a broken back and paralysis for the rest of his life in a wheelchair, has been another tragedy this year.
Wednesday, April 24th [1985] [DIARY]
Back home again after two weeks in Florida with Reeve and her family and Land, flying in for a business conference on problems of the ranch (our inability to sell it) and Maui. He has been struggling over both for over three years, alone much of the time and doing only maintenance work: no animals, no help, and really no incentive to go on. This is the common lot today of the farmers and ranchers and part of the nationwide recession. All the loan companies in Montana are closed and many farms and ranches are going through bankruptcy. It is not his fault, but he blames himself for not getting out of it fast enough. He sold the cows at the right moment, but he should have, he says, sold the ranch at the same time.
We are all in the same condominium on the beach at Fort Myers (one of Jim’s). Land and I are in the same apartment, and Reeve and the two girls and Richard two floors below us. We meet for meals and walks on the beach.
Switzerland
Saturday, July 27th [1985] [DIARY]
The first weeks have been busy with very hot weather—very un-Swiss-like—and many people. The heat, rather than the people (all friends), tires me—and just getting the chalet running again. It is an awkward house to run easily, awkwardly planned, with the main living on the second floor. One is climbing up and down stairs all day. It was not built for older people. But we were not old when we built it. In active middle age, we wanted solitude (isolation, really), quiet country life, far from people and towns. Now this is, or can be, isolation, loneliness, inaccessibility, and a certain amount of discomfort. My friends do come see me.…
Susan W., Faith’s daughter, arrived a week ago to “help” me. She has been a year in Grenoble and speaks French very well. She is a warm, open, fresh-faced, healthy girl, very eager to help—with tact and efficiency and energy. I say “girl” because, though she is (or will be) a senior in college next year, she seems younger. She has really helped me, washing dishes and laundry, carrying groceries, shopping, taking Berwick for walks, and even cutting down the overgrown bushy bank behind the kitchen windows and digging a hole to transplant my big lavender bush.
Con is struggling with the long ordeal of a dying husband. I feel so for her. I keep thinking of C. and our similar time with him. One cannot help going over it in one’s memory, reliving it. It was easier for me; the children gave so much support. And it was not as drawn out, and C. was so courageous and wise and patient. He was himself till the end. Much of it was not easy—for him or for us—but we managed. People must be allowed to die in their own way, I realize more and more.
And their “ways” are so different. C. on the whole was far-seeing and patient, accepting of his death and planning openly for it. Aubrey seems to be “fighting” all the way; he is a fighter, so that is his way. But I feel he is fighting the “Battle of Britain” in this last fight and Con has to fight with him, which is sapping every bit of her strength and spirit. She is almost numb after so many years: no spark left of that intuitive creativity, no time, no rest, and no let-up. Margot, too, is working with a husband who is, I fear, retreating from life—gently, slowly and almost unconsciously. This may be his way, quite different from Aubrey’s and very different from Margot’s (who is also a fighter and is trying, and has tried for years, to fight for him, for his health and his physical flexibility).
But one has to let them choose their own avenues of retreat. Is there not a moment when one should accept one’s retreat? To say, Death is not so terrible. I have reached the point in my life when I am ready to let go—to ease out of life? I remember Amey in old age telling me, “It’s so hard to know when to hang on and when to let go.” I didn’t appreciate what she meant then, but I do now. She taught me the little I know about age.
Eglantine is looking forward, almost, to life after death. Margot believes, less tangibly, in reincarnation, and Yvonne, of course, is steeped in the Christian faith, in resurrection or “living in Christ.” As for me, I believe, in my own vague way, that something “goes on,” but I do not define it. Spirit, surely, is not wasted. Does it merge into the “great unconscious” or does it remain only—only? Is this not enough?—in the minds and hearts of others? CAL certainly
believed something “went on,” and I do sometimes feel close to that “something.”
It is harder with the death of a child. What remains of little Jonathan? One cannot bear that spark snuffed out. Or my first baby? Mme Christen, whom I have just seen, spoke of Jonathan as a little angel. It would be nice to believe in angels, and sometimes I almost do. Now I must stop.
At least this writing in my diary lets me tap down to a deeper, quieter level. It is worthwhile, even if not a book—the last book. I must go to lunch preparation—just picnicky. But first, I must rescue, with a glass and a piece of paper, a brown and gold butterfly with a black eye on each wing, escaped from the lavender bush and beating its wings against my window pane …
I was successful! He is free.
Darien
January 2nd, 1986
Darling Reeve:
I will be thinking about you this long and difficult week. I will not try and call you, but I am here if you want to call me. I am enclosing excerpts from The Sacred Pipe (Black Elk’s account of the seven rites of the Oglala Sioux, recorded by Joseph Epes Brown) which Susie sent and wrote me about.
I know we fret that anniversaries mark distance, that time is bearing those we love and have lost further away. But perhaps we have too linear a sense of time. Time is perhaps, as the old Mexicans felt, not a river running away, but an ocean around us in which we are steeped. Time, in the article about the Navajo craftswoman, “surrounds her, as do her dwelling place, her family, her clan, her tribe, her habitat, her dances, her rituals.”
Anyway, my love is around you!
*The trailer had been given to CAL by Henry Ford in 1942 for use as an office or writing studio, as well as for several road trips. AML used it as her studio until a more permanent structure was built.
†Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had six children: Charles Jr., born in 1930, died in 1932; Jon, born in 1932; Land, born in 1937; Anne, born in 1940, died in 1993; Scott, born in 1942; and Reeve, born in 1945.
*Dana W. Atchley (1893–1982), a physician from Englewood, New Jersey, who practiced in New York City. He was recommended by AML’s friends Adelaide Marquand and Ellen Barry as a physician with a warm bedside manner and excellent diagnostic skills. Among his other patients were Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and Nancy (“Slim”) Hayworth. See also Introduction.
*Dr. Everett M. Hawks, AML’s obstetrician.
†Mrs. Lindbergh often refers to her husband as “C.” or “CAL” (Charles Augustus Lindbergh). She is referred to in these notes as AML. Her mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, is referred to as ECM.
*Founded in 1909, the Cosmopolitan Club is a private club for women on the Upper East Side of New York City.
†Here AML draws a wide-eyed smiley face.
*Gall bladder operation mentioned previously.
*At Charles Lindbergh’s suggestion, Reader’s Digest contracted with AML for a series of articles on postwar Europe. She left on August 1, 1947, traveling across France, Germany, and England; Charles remained in Connecticut with the children. On her return nine weeks later, she wrote five pieces, which were published in Life, Harper’s, and Reader’s Digest.
*Major Truman Smith (1893–1977) was a military attaché in Berlin from 1935 to 1939, later a German specialist in the U.S. Military Intelligence Division and personal adviser to General George C. Marshall.
*DeWitt Wallace, founding editor of Reader’s Digest magazine.
*Dr. Shoup, the family pediatrician, who made house calls.
*A housekeeper for the Lindberghs.
*An island off Florida’s southwest coast, where the Lindberghs vacationed.
*Evelyn (Evie) Ames, wife of Amyas Ames, author, poet, conservationist, and close friend from New York City.
†Too intentional.
*Because of discretion I have lost my life.
*In 1946, in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Charles Lindbergh was asked to serve as a consultant to a secret committee called CHORE (Chicago Ordnance Research), which was based at the University of Chicago and included Enrico Fermi and other preeminent scientists. Its purpose was to assess the morality and practicality of using nuclear and other advanced weaponry in the future. Lindbergh gathered information, tested equipment, and spent a great deal of time analyzing it for several years thereafter, “often bringing the most humanistic perspective into the room” (A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh [New York: Putnam, 1998]).
†D. H. Lawrence.
‡Enrico Fermi, Harold C. Urey, Charles E. Bartley.
*Of Flight and Life, which was published in hardcover in August 1948 by Scribner.
†Here AML draws a smiley face.
*Kenny Goodkind, a cabin mate of Land’s at the Teton Valley Ranch in Wyoming, was killed when struck by lightning.
†Referring to the kidnapping and murder of the Lindberghs’ first child, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., in March 1932.
‡From “Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison,” attributed to Ben Jonson (1572–1637).
*A small structure built on the point of Contentment Island, across the cove from the Lindbergh home in Darien, where AML went to write.
†An editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
‡For many years the working title for what became Gift from the Sea.
*Elisabeth Reeve Morrow Morgan (1904–1934), AML’s elder sister, was an educator and founder of the school now known as the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, New Jersey. She died of complications following surgery.
†Family members believe AML is referring to the death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot and author of The Little Prince (he wrote the preface to the French edition of her second book, Listen! the Wind). A brief but intense friendship grew between them after their first meeting in 1939. She learned in 1944 that Saint-Exupéry’s P-38 had gone down in a reconnaissance mission over southern France and wrote in her diary that her grief was “this way with the baby and with Elisabeth.… I felt incredibly alone” (from War Within and Without, pp. 446–447).
*Elizabeth Cutter Morrow (1873–1955).
*Here AML draws a smiley face.
*Nickname for AML’s daughter Anne.
†The name of the boat on which the Lindberghs had been exploring the Florida coastline, named for one of the brightest stars in the night sky, part of the constellation Taurus.
*AML and CAL were married on May 27, 1929.
*AML’s mother-in-law, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1875–1954).
†Margot Loines Morrow (1912–), a former actress and longtime student of Buddhism, married AML’s brother, Dwight Morrow Jr., in 1937.
‡D. Rajagopal, who with his wife, Rosalind Rajagopal, was a close associate of Jiddu Krishnamurti, through the Theosophical Society.
*George Ivanovitch Gurdyev, or Gurdjieff (1872–1949), philosopher who founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1919. His followers believed that most humans exist in an almost “sleeping” state, but that by adhering to Gurdjieff’s principles one could achieve heightened states of being.
*Swedish for “father’s mother,” this was the Lindbergh children’s nickname for CAL’s mother.
†Newsreels produced by Fox Movietone News between 1928 and 1963. The filming of CAL’s takeoff from Roosevelt Field in 1927 was the initial motivation for the establishment of the company.
*Eight-year-old Scott and five-year-old Reeve decided to run away to Alaska. A neighbor gave them a ride to a big open field and said, “This is Alaska.” They were satisfied and walked home.
†Adelaide Ferry Hooker Marquand, former member of America First and wife of John Marquand (1893–1960), Pulitzer Prize–winning American novelist best known for his “Mr. Moto” spy novels.
*Constance Morrow Morgan (1913–1995), AML’s younger sister.
*Eleanor Forde Newton, a longtime friend of AML’s from Florida. Along with her husband, Jim, she was an early activist with the Oxford Group, an
evangelistic Christian movement later known as Moral Re-Armament.
†James Draper Newton (husband of Eleanor Forde Newton), real-estate developer, conservationist, labor negotiator, and lifelong friend of CAL’s, Thomas Edison’s, Harvey Firestone’s, and Henry Ford’s.
*Ruth Thomas Oliff helped the Lindberghs with child care and secretarial work in the 1940s, then moved west and raised her own family, which included a daughter named for AML.
*Olaf Leonhard Gulbransson (1873–1958), artist, illustrator, painter, and educator, was best known for his satirical cartoons and illustrations.
*Smith College was the alma mater of AML, her mother, and her sisters.
†Major Truman Smith (see note on this page).
*Here AML draws a smiley face.
*Max Picard (1888–1965), a Swiss writer and philosopher whose book The World of Silence was published in 1948.
*Dr. Dana W. Atchley. See note on this page.
*Dr. William A. Atchley, Dana Atchley’s son.
†Dr. John Nathaniel Rosen (1902–1983), a pioneering psychiatrist based in Pennsylvania, was initially engaged to treat Dwight Morrow Jr. when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Rosen would go on to treat AML and her daughter Anne for depression; Reeve was also treated by him for depression during her son Jonathan’s illness and after his death.
*A friend of AML’s who was going through a difficult period in her life.
†From “Little Gidding” (the last of the Four Quartets).
*Alan Chester Valentine (1901–1980), president of the University of Rochester, also served in the Truman administration. See Introduction, this page.
†A large number of diary entries and letters from the preceding two-year period were destroyed by AML after her analysis (see this page).
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