Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Jon Lindbergh took charge of transporting his father from Harkness Pavilion to Hana. Dr. Atchley recommended an Air Force ambulance plane, but Sam Pryor, then in New York, said that would be politically difficult. He offered a special plane from his fleet, but Jon said his father’s principles would not rest well with that or with a private charter. A regularly scheduled United Airlines flight seemed the only alternative, despite the high risk of publicity. Pryor said Lindbergh’s stretcher could be placed over the first-class seats, and privacy curtains could enclose the entire compartment of the plane. Lindbergh was thinking of making the flight sometime the following week; but Atchley said he did not think they should wait that long. They targeted Sunday morning.

  On Saturday, Lindbergh received two blood transfusions. Revitalized, he spent much of the day reminiscing with Jon about growing up in Minnesota. He called Sam Pryor, who said United Airlines was prepared for the special situation and that the airline doctor would sign the consent form necessary for so unfit a passenger. Then one of Lindbergh’s attending physicians announced that he and all the doctors involved in his case had unanimously agreed that the plan was “medically unsound” and “incompletely thought out.” He said he wanted at least thirty-six hours in which he would put together a small medical team to accompany the patient. Lindbergh asked the doctor to elucidate, in strictly medical terms. The physician described the worsening pneumonia, the spreading cancer, and the recurring infections; he mentioned the possibilities of hemorrhage, discomfort, lack of privacy in the plane, and an emergency landing should he become worse en route.

  Lindbergh praised the doctors for having done “a magnificent job,” but he realized they were fighting a losing battle. He did not want to chance “another 36 hours,” which might bring enough deterioration to prevent his going at all. The doctor accused the patient of turning his back on medical science. Lindbergh replied that science had done all it could, that the problem was no longer medical but philosophical.

  William Jovanovich appeared twice that day, to discuss the final manuscript and contract. Before leaving, Lindbergh gazed at his friend and asked, “Do you think I am dying well?” Jovanovich said yes.

  Later that day, Lindbergh discussed his burial plans with Jon. He described the plot he had arranged at the Kipahulu church and the kind of grave he wanted, right down to its drainage system. Scott was not sure whether their father meant for him to come to Hawaii, where he had never been. But there was no question in anybody else’s mind about his making the trip. That evening, Lindbergh spoke by telephone to his daughters, who had gone with their children to North Haven. Anne, Scott, and Jon packed up Lindbergh’s belongings and returned to Darien. For the sake of logistics, Lindbergh insisted they meet him the next morning at Kennedy airport, without stopping off in the city.

  Bill Jovanovich arrived at the hospital at 6:30 that morning and met one of the attending doctors, who said there was a good chance Lindbergh would die in the air. The publisher rode with Lindbergh in the ambulance to the airport, where Sam Pryor awaited, having arranged the getaway without any publicity. A little after eight, the family and Pryor stood in the first-class section of the United jet, leaving room for a pair of stretcher-bearers to carry Lindbergh aboard. As they were about to transfer him onto the bed that had been made over two knocked-down seats, Lindbergh, referring to Jovanovich, said, “I know you are strong fellows but let my friend here hold my middle: I am pretty tall.” After doing his part, Jovanovich leaned over and kissed him twice.

  By the time Sam Pryor said good-bye, Lindbergh’s eyes began to well up with tears. The curtain was drawn around the bed, which was six inches too short for its patient and was lengthened with a stack of pillows. The family took their seats on the opposite side of the cabin; and then the other passengers, unaware of the proceedings up-front, boarded.

  United Airlines flight 987, a DC-8, departed at 10:30 that morning. Lindbergh nodded off through much of the trip and drank some water and milk along the way. Scott administered his father’s medicine during the journey. For the most part, Anne sat by his side, watching the country pass below, commenting to her sons that this trip was analogous to the historic flight in 1927, as “No one believed he could do either and survive.”

  As the Hawaiian Islands came into view, Lindbergh perked up and looked out the window with obvious pleasure. Approaching Honolulu, the captain wanted first to circle Maui, providing his special passenger with a panorama of the island. Lindbergh rejected the idea, noting that all the others on board had schedules to keep.

  Land Lindbergh had traveled from Montana to Honolulu, arriving two hours before his father. He used the time to ensure Lindbergh’s smooth transfer to an ambulance plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft, which Sam Pryor had arranged to be drawn up to the side of the jet. As he entered the first-class cabin of the United jet, Land was shocked to see how much weight his father had lost; but he took heart in the brightness in his eyes and the firmness of his handshake. A young medical attendant cursorily checked Lindbergh over and cheerily said he would be up in no time. Despite the young man’s kind intentions, the fatuousness of the remark made Lindbergh angry, and he told him off. As the patient was moved from one plane to the other, three pilots stood off in the distance, holding their caps in their hands. Land accompanied his parents in the Beechcraft, his brothers following a little later.

  Lindbergh had asked Milton Howell not to bother meeting him at the Hana airstrip, but the doctor disobeyed. Before deplaning, Lindbergh motioned him to his side. “Now, it is understood why I have come here, isn’t it?” Lindbergh asked. “I know I am going to die…. I know that I have only a short time to live. I don’t want anything unnecessary. I don’t want any heroics.” He asked Howell to assist in making his demise “a constructive act.”

  The Pechins’ small guest cottage sat atop a hill, its living room opening onto a large lanai with a beautiful view of the coast. Oxygen and intravenous equipment were set up in the bedroom, which looked directly out onto tropical foliage and the Pacific. Lindbergh appeared extremely pleased to be there; and to the sound of the surf below, he fell asleep.

  The new day began with Dr. Howell outlining his basic program, which was to keep Lindbergh as alert as possible, though never at the expense of comfort. He explained that the malignancy had already blocked one lung and there were indications that it had spread to the other. Once it attacked the pleura or heart covering, there could be severe pain, which Howell said he would control with sedatives.

  Lindbergh began this journey as he had all his others, with checklists. Usually in the mornings, when he was feeling strongest, he funneled all his energies into final preparations, particularizing how he wished each step of his departure carried out. “Details,” Jon noted in a log he kept, “to a minute degree that appalls the rest of us. How do you talk about such things with someone that close to you who is dying. It may be rational enough, but it takes some getting used to…. He is looking at death as one last adventure and throwing himself into the preparation to the fullest.”

  Lindbergh started with the grave, which he wanted Tevi Kahaleuahi to prepare in the traditional Hawaiian style. Island superstition generally restricted the digging of a man’s final resting place until he had died; but, having already been condemned to death, Lindbergh urged Tevi to start digging right away. A local Kahuna, a holy man, blessed the site before Tevi put more than a dozen workers on the job. The fourteen-by-fourteen-by-twelve-foot pit was partitioned, leaving room for Anne, and lined with lava rock, two feet thick along the sides. Tevi inspected every rock for size, shape, and smoothness. “Father was obsessed about drainage,” Jon observed; and that led to a lengthy argument about the removal of a wild plum tree in one corner of the burial plot. When Tevi said he would be sad to see the plum tree go, Lindbergh agreed to let it stay.

  The Lindbergh sons worked on the grave as well. “It might seem that helping build your father’s grave even before he died would be very strange,” Jon Lindbergh
wrote that week. “But in actuality it felt an intimate, very loving family project. To do something physical in this respect was very strong therapy for me.” More vigorous since arriving in Hana, Lindbergh thought for a moment that the move there might just have bought him a few extra days, possibly weeks. But on August twenty-third, he felt “rather punk” and suggested adding men to the digging crew.

  Lindbergh asked his friend John Hanchett, vice president of the Hana Ranch, to oversee the building of his coffin. He wanted it made by hand of native wood—rough-sawn, flat-sided and -topped, with no curves. Two ranch hands built the box as specified, using one-inch-thick planks of eucalyptus robusta, known locally as “swamp mahagony.”

  Another discussion dealt with the lining of the coffin. Lindbergh wanted several layers of different biodegradable materials, starting with a tarpaulin on the bottom. On top of that he wanted cowhide, until Hanchett said the only hides readily available were greasy and smelly. Anne suggested an old Hudson Bay blanket that Charles had once given his mother. Calls were made to the family members stateside to locate it, and it was express-mailed that day. Lindbergh wished to be covered with tapa cloth and cotton sheets from Argonauta. Nobody could find pure cotton sheets there, so he settled on fifty-percent cotton, fifty-percent polyester.

  Lindbergh also asked Hanchett to order his headstone, a slab of granite two-feet-by-three-and-a-half feet and almost a foot-and-a-half thick—so heavy that it would not be disturbed. It would come from the Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vermont. He wanted the sides rough-hewn, polished on top only where it would be inscribed. From a sample book Lindbergh selected a simple typeface to be cut one-quarter of an inch into the stone, just deep enough so that the elements would keep it clean. Below his name, he wanted to note the dates and places of his birth and death, Michigan and Maui; and beneath that, he and his wife and their three sons agreed on a two-line passage from the 139th Psalm, which suggested a supreme belief in the Lord: “If I take the wings of the morning, / And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.” The remainder of the passage, which would not be inscribed, went on to say: “Even there would Thy hand lead me. / And Thy right hand would hold me.”

  They turned their attention next to the funeral services. Lindbergh wanted one short service before the burial, a prayer and hymn at the gravesite, and a slightly longer memorial service a day or two later. He insisted on no eulogy. Instead, he wanted passages read from a broad range of thought, evidencing his belief that “no one culture or religion had a monopoly on truth.” Anne presented a potpourri from which he selected readings from Isaiah, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Gandhi, St. Augustine, the Hindu Mundaka Upanishad, and a Navajo prayer. Anne also offered her husband a sampling of hymns. While singing one she thought suitable, Charles shook his head and said it was no good. “But,” Anne replied, “the music is by Bach, and you can’t do better than that.” Charles said, “The music is all right, but the words are corny.” Anne wondered what to do, until he resolved the situation: “Let’s just have Hawaiian hymns,” he said, “then nobody will know what they mean.”

  Lindbergh also requested that at least part of the service be conducted by a Hawaiian deacon, Henry Kahula, who was the proprietor of the local Chevron station. Anne paid a call on him, and he suggested a number of Hawaiian poems, prayers, and hymns, which he would sprinkle through the service. Lindbergh wanted the funeral kept private, noting that anyone from Kipahulu was welcome. He asked Dr. Howell to see that his pallbearers, local men who were working on the coffin and grave, attended in work clothes. Howell protested, explaining that they would want to show their respect by wearing their finest clothes. Besides, he told Lindbergh, “You can’t tell people what to wear.”

  Lindbergh then asked Milton Howell if he would perform perhaps the most difficult task, that of representing the family to the press. Lindbergh felt that the articulate physician, who had once served as Mayor of Glencoe, Minnesota, could best protect Anne. When it came time to face the inevitable barrage of journalists, Lindbergh said, “I would like for you to answer the questions just as they are. I would hope that it would be kept dignified—which you do very well.” To Howell’s surprise, Lindbergh said that he wanted the editor of the Maui News—and nobody else—to be informed of the impending death right away, so that when the moment came, the obituary would be practically written. By establishing this exclusive arrangement, Lindbergh believed he could buy his family a few extra hours. Indeed, the island was already talking.

  A minister from California named John Tincher had been assigned to the Congregational Church in Hana for the month of August. The young reverend was just a few days from leaving the island when he learned that Charles Lindbergh had recently been flown in to die and that he was staying in a secret location. One day, while shopping in the little Hana Ranch Grocery, Tincher could not help noticing the small woman in front of him at the cash register who seemed to be buying out the store. Tincher watched as Anne Lindbergh signed for her provisions. After making his purchase, he followed her to her car and introduced himself, indicating that he was “available if she wanted to talk to somebody at this time.” On Friday, the twenty-third, she drove to his beach house and left a note with her telephone number. He called, and they met the next day for an hour. Neither committed to his conducting a service, because Tincher had to leave the island the following Tuesday.

  When they needed a break from the emotionally difficult tasks at hand, Anne and her three sons went to Argonauta, where they hacked away with machetes at the mimosa brush, cane grass, and banana patches that had grown around the house. Exerting themselves in the hot sun made them feel they were sweating out their “troubles and tensions.”

  For hours at a time, between Lindbergh’s naps or in the evenings, at least one family member would sit with him as he reminisced—about his mother and “Brother,” about the early days of aviation, about the war. America First was on his mind as well; and he told Land one day, “Don’t let your mother spend a lot of time defending me.” Each night he wanted an update on the progress of his grave.

  Surrounded by their sons one evening, Anne asked Charles if he would describe what he was feeling, because, she said, “you’re going through an experience we all have to go through.” He said he had never before realized that “death is so close all the time—it’s right there next to you,” and that he felt totally “relaxed” about it. “It’s harder on you watching than it is on me,” he added. One day, they tried to get him out on the lanai to behold the beautiful view, but the effort proved too great. “I can’t do this,” he said; “I have to go back in.” He lost a little ground every day and said he had already come close to crossing over two or three times.

  Each of the sons had enough private moments with his father to prevent later regrets about things left unsaid. In surviving the last two weeks, Lindbergh had made up for the lost time with Scott. Their mutual love and respect became obvious to them and everybody around them. “Great relief to M[other],” Jon observed in his diary. “A ray of light in a rather dark scene.” Having left his wife alone to care for their troops of primates, Scott had to return to France. The whole family, however, rejoiced in the reconciliation, including Ansy and Reeve, who remained in North Haven, receiving regular reports.

  On August twenty-fifth, the grave and casket were completed; and Jon returned to Seattle. He expected to see his father again but realized there was a good chance he would be too late in returning.

  Lindbergh’s breathing became labored that afternoon, and he felt chest pains. Dr. Howell, who had been visiting twice a day, gave him aspirin with codeine, half-grain tablets which Lindbergh broke up, swallowing quarter-grain bits only when necessary. Because he steadily drank enough fluids, Howell never had to hook him up to an intravenous drip. He did keep an oxygen mask at Lindbergh’s side, however, which he replaced that afternoon with a larger breathing apparatus. “Now, Doctor,” Lindbergh asked that Sunday night, “is the calibre of the oxygen tube really large enough
to supply me with the amount of oxygen I need?” In fact, it was not, as the lymphosarcoma was filling his lungs. Later that night, reaching over to adjust a valve so that he might get more air, his arm dropped and he drifted into a coma. Dr. Howell sedated him and planned to move him to the clinic the next day at nine. Anne, Land, and a nurse remained by his side through the night, his wife holding his hand.

  In the morning—Monday, August twenty-sixth—Lindbergh seemed at peace. After an early breakfast, Anne and Land went into the bedroom and found him barely breathing. The Howells arrived a few minutes after seven; and after examining him, the doctor said, “He’s going now.” Anne took his hand and could hardly believe how lifeless it had become since the night before. Land instinctively wanted to hold his father, but he knew how much he disliked being touched. And so, with his mother at one end of the bed, he sat at the other, putting his hand on his father’s foot. For more than ten minutes they sat there as the room became increasingly still. “And then,” recalled Land, “he just went.”

  Silently, everybody left the room, leaving Anne alone with Charles. She gave him a last kiss. She wanted to have a longer moment alone with him, but there was no time. He had prepared everybody to move him from his bed to his grave as swiftly as possible, not only to beat the invasion of the press but also for legal reasons.

  Lindbergh had insisted that he not be embalmed. A “natural” burial was legal in Hawaii so long as it occurred within eight hours of death. But the law also prohibited interment until a death certificate had been signed by the coroner, and he was on “the other side” of the island. At Lindbergh’s urging, Dr. Howell had already made preparations. He had filled out the certificate with everything except the date of death; he had apprised the coroner of the situation; and he had his son standing by to drive the document to him in Wailuku, two hours away. Howell followed all of Lindbergh’s instructions to the letter. He dispatched his son; he summoned Tevi, on a construction job on the other side of the island; he notified the police, asking them to provide security around the cottage and the church; and he called the newspaper editor, telling him that Lindbergh had died and asking him to hold the news at least until noon.