The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  My heart weeps.

  9

  Then the clouds close over again, and it is a bad day, a bad evening. She balks at going into the dining room and, once there, refuses to eat. She picks up her empty salad plate and there is a wild gleam in her eye as she says, “I can break this plate if I want to.”

  I say, “But you don’t want to, Mother.” It would be better to keep my mouth shut. But this is my mother, my rational, courteous, Southern gentlewoman mother, behaving in this irrational manner.

  After dinner I call the dogs and go down the lane and weep. I have done a lot of crying on the lane. I cried whenever a book was rejected with an impersonal printed rejection slip. I cried when Hugh and I had a misunderstanding. Now I cry because I want my mother to die.

  And I cry out of fear for myself. Will I ever be like that, a travesty of a person? It was the last thing she would have wanted, to live in this unliving, unloving manner. I look up at the sky and shout at the stars, “Take her, God! Take her!”

  A few days ago I asked our doctor and friend, “John, is Mother dying?”

  “Nature is not that kind. Your mother’s blood pressure is better than yours.”

  Mine tends to drop when I’m tired; probably better than if it rose.

  John suggested that we rent a hospital bed to make caring for her easier. How long is this going to go on? Is it fair to subject the entire family to this? What is it doing to the little girls? They have already experienced a different kind of death, in moving here from England, from Lincoln, the only home they have known. Léna said goodbye to her English great-grandmother. “We’re going to America, and we’ll never, ever see you again.” True, but it didn’t go down very well.

  In the spring Josephine had a miscarriage, and this death, for the children, was not so much the death of a tiny, unformed life they had never known, as the fact that their mother, the foundation of their world, could be suddenly and without warning taken from them. Will it wound them or strengthen them to be in this house this summer?

  It’s one thing for me. I’m the only child. Is it fair to make the whole family suffer for what I believe? I talked awhile, earlier this summer, about wanting my mother to have a dignified death. But there is nothing dignified about incontinence and senility.

  She is my mother. I have no brothers and sisters with whom to share responsibilities and decisions. The others, no matter how close, are at one remove at least. Have I the right to drag them through this with me? It is, in any case, not only my decision. The entire household is involved. After our discussions we come to no decisions, but I feel sustained and supported. We have talked today, in the hot sunlight, on this lane where I am walking now in the starlight. The strength of the family gives me strength. The dogs know that I am upset, and I do not mind letting go in front of them. They dash down the lane, into the bushes, circle back, and sniff me anxiously. Their concern makes me break into a loud sob, and Tyrrell leaps to give my wet face a loving lick. We are too far from the house for anybody to hear me, but it is time for me to dry my eyes and go home.

  I learned several years ago that a four-generation summer can be a good one only if we all have our own survival routines. Each one of us must manage to find a time of solitude and privacy. Hugh, when he is in Crosswicks, goes to his garden. Alan goes out to the Tower to read and write. I do not want to take my pain out on the rest of the family, so every afternoon, before time to cook dinner, I go across the fields to the brook, pushing through the tall grass nearly ready for its first haying, with the dogs circling joyfully about me. When I am out of sight Mother is apt to send for me. “Where’s Madeleine? Get Madeleine.” At the brook I’m beyond the reach of even a loud shout. If anybody really wants me, somebody has to come fetch me.

  I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I’m much more use to family and friends when I’m not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective.

  Across the brook is a stone bridge; it is not a natural bridge; it was put there a century or more ago by skillful hands and no modern stone-moving tools. It was probably part of one of the early roads, barely wide enough for a single horse and rider. I sit on it and dangle my legs over the gentle flowing of the water, shaded by maple and beech, birch and ash trees. I need perspective, and how to find it? caught in the middle of things, never quite able to avoid subjectivity, or to get the thinking me and the feeling me to coincide.

  This makes me confused, makes me lose sight of reality. I feel my lacks as wife, daughter, mother; and if I dwell too much on my lacks they become even greater, and I am further from—not just reality, but the truth of this summer. Will I ever know it?

  When Josephine was just a year old, I spent most of the summer alone at Crosswicks because Hugh was off working at various summer theatres, and Mother had broken her ankle in the spring and so could not join us until August. During these solitary weeks I wrote a full first draft of a book. It was my fourth full-length novel, and I had reluctantly put the third on the shelf, after many revisions; so I felt especially precarious about the summer’s work, and I knew that how I would feel about that particular summer for the rest of my life was going to depend on what happened with my manuscript.

  The book was well received by the publisher and—eventually—the press, and is still, after all these years, selling. And so, I remember that summer as a “good” summer. If the book had been rejected, it would be forever in my memory a “bad” summer. That’s irrational, but it’s the way things are.

  So what of the verisimilitude of that long-gone summer? Do I know it at all? It was a time of solitude, rather than loneliness, because I was happy with my writing, happy with my baby. But what was it really like? I don’t know.

  So I will probably never fathom the reality of this summer. What is the truth of the ninety-year-old woman waiting for me at the house, who is changed beyond recognition and yet who is still my mother?

  For a human being, truth is verisimilitude, a likeness to what is real, which is as close as we can get to reality. It has taken me many years to learn that reality is far more than meets the human eye, or ear, or mind, and that the greatest minds have never attained more than fragmentary flashes of what is really real.

  Below me on a flat, mossy stone in the brook sits a small green frog. What is a frog? What is the reality of a frog? I was fascinated by a scientific article which showed pictures of a frog as seen by a human eye, by a bird’s eye, by a snake’s eye. Each saw a very different creature. Which frog was more real?

  All of us in Crosswicks this summer see a different person when we look at my mother. Vicki and Janet and Margie have known her all their lives, as Jo’s and Maria’s and Bion’s grandmother. For my children, she has been a very special grandmother. When Josephine had mononucleosis the first winter of her marriage, she didn’t get well until she was sent down to Grandmother to be petted and pampered and cosseted. Bion, each spring vacation, says, “I have to go South for a week with Grandmother.” I know a very different person from the one my children do. I know only a fragment of this old lady. She is far more than I can begin to understand. She was fifty-five when my father died; the woman he was married to for nearly thirty years is not the woman I know. I have pictures of her when she was a baby, a young girl, a bride, but this past of my mother’s is beyond my comprehension. I am far from understanding her reality.

  The Greeks come to my help again; they have a word for the realness of things, the essence of a frog, of the stone bridge I am sitting on, of my mother: ousia.

  If I am to be constant in loving and honoring my mother I must not lose sight of ousia. It’s a good word; it’s my new word. Last summer my word was ontology: the wo
rd about being. This summer I need to go a step further, to ousia, the essence of being, to that which is really real.

  The frog makes a small, clunking noise and hops to another stone and sits, his pale green throat pulsing. He is: frog: unworried by the self-consciousness with which the human animal is stuck; it is our blessing and our curse; not only do we know, we know that we know. And we are not often willing to face how little we know.

  I learn slowly, and always the hard way. Trying to be what I am not, and cannot be, is not only arrogant, it is stupid. If I spend the entire day hovering around Mother, trying to be the perfect daughter, available every time she asks, “Where’s Madeleine?”; if I get up early with my grandbabies and then stay up late with my actor husband and get no rest during the day; if I have no time in which to write; if I make myself a martyr to appease my false guilt, then I am falling into the age-old trap of pride. I fall into it too often.

  A conversation with a friend helped open my eyes. Connie is about ten years older than I am, and her mother died a year ago, and Connie is filled with guilt. Now I happen to know that Connie was more than just a dutiful daughter; she kept her mother at home until a hospital was inevitable; she visited her daily thereafter; the difficult old woman was treated with love and kindness; and I told Connie that if anybody had little cause for guilt, it was she. But the guilt was obviously there, and a sore weight. So I said that we all, all of us without exception, have cause for guilt about our parents, and that I had far more cause than she. Then I heard myself saying, “I don’t think real guilt is ever much of a problem for us. It’s false guilt that causes the trouble.” Connie gave me a funny, surprised look, and said, “I think you’re right.”

  And a load of guilt fell from my own shoulders.

  I certainly have legitimate cause for both real and false guilt with my mother. But when I try to be the perfect daughter, to be in control of the situation, I become impaled on false guilt and become overtired and irritable.

  It is only by accepting real guilt that I am able to feel free of guilt as I sit on the stone bridge and cool my feet in the dappled shade and admire the pop eyes of the frog; and it comes to me that if I am not free to accept guilt when I do wrong, then I am not free at all. If all my mistakes are excused, if there’s an alibi, a rationalization for every blunder, then I am not free at all. I have become subhuman:

  At best I am far from a perfect wife, or mother, or daughter. I do all kinds of things which aren’t right, which aren’t sensitive or understanding. I neglect all kinds of things which I ought to do. But Connie made me realize that one reason I don’t feel guilty is that I no longer feel I have to be perfect. I am not in charge of the universe, whereas a humanist has to be, and when something goes wrong, tiny, delicate Connie, like most convinced humanists I’ve known, becomes enclosed with self-blame because she can’t cope with the situation, and this inability presents her with a picture of herself which is not the all-competent, in-control-of-everything person she wants to see.

  It is a trap we all fall into on occasion, but it is particularly open to the intelligent atheist. There is no God, and if there is, he’s not arranging things very well; therefore, I must be in charge. If I don’t succeed, if I am not perfect, I carry the weight of the whole universe on my shoulders.

  And so the false guilt which follows the refusal to admit any failure is inevitable.

  10

  It is only when I can shake off the load of false guilt that I can contemplate death. I do not like thinking about death. I am bad about death. Death is not—despite the Romantics—natural. Death is the enemy, and I hate it. My only weapon against death is to do my dying freely, consciously. This summer is practice in dying for me as well as for my mother.

  Our lives are a series of births and deaths: we die to one period and must be born to another. We die to childhood and are born to adolescence; to our high-school selves and (if we are fortunate) to our college selves; we die to our college selves and are born into the “real” world; to our unmarried selves and into our married. To become a parent is birth to a new self for the mother and father as well as for the baby. When Hugh and I moved from the city to live year round at Crosswicks, this was death to one way of life and birth to another. Then nine years later when we took our children, aged seven, ten, and twelve, out of a big house, a quiet village, a small country school, and moved back to New York and the world of the theatre, this was another experience of death and birth.

  Both life and death are present for me in the house this summer. I look at Mother, and think that if I am to reflect on the eventual death of her body, of all bodies, in a way that is not destructive, I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom; the death of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less.

  The times I have been most fully me are when I have been wholly involved in someone or something else; when I am listening, rather than talking; cooking a special, festive dinner; struggling with a fugue at the piano; putting a baby to bed; writing. A long-dead philosopher said that if we practice dying enough during our lives we will hardly notice the moment of transition when the actual time comes. But I am far from a saint, and I am seldom able to practice consciously this kind of dying; it is not a do-it-yourself activity. I know about it only after it has happened, and I am only now beginning to recognize it for what it is.

  It has nothing to do with long-faced self-righteousness, with pomposity or piousity. It does not preclude play or laughter. It is light, not heavy; merry, not sad; and it is realistic and never sentimental.

  Our lives are given a certain dignity by their very evanescence. If there were never to be an end to my quiet moments at the brook, if I could sit on the rock forever, I would not treasure these minutes so much. If our associations with the people we love were to have no termination, we would not value them as much as we do. Human love is an extraordinary gift, but like all flesh it is corruptible. Death or distance separates all lovers. My awareness of my husband is sharpened by impermanence.

  Would we really value anything we could have forever and ever? This is not the first time death has come close to my heart. I was close to the deaths of my grandparents, my father, many relatives and friends. When Hugh and I were in our early thirties, four of our closest friends died, people who were so intimate a part of our lives that their dying changed the very fabric of our days. All four of these deaths were unexpected, and only Don, a fine actor in his seventies, was not cut off in medias res.

  Of these four deaths the one which changed our lives most irrevocably was Liz’s, because it brought seven-year-old Maria into our family.

  Our phone rang one quiet January evening while we were getting ready for dinner. If The Magic Flute will always mean Crosswicks and Margie; if the Tallis Variations will always mean this one particular summer; Glück’s Orpheo ed Euridice will always remind me of Arthur, because it was on the record player when the phone rang. I answered, and Liz said, “Arthur’s dead.”

  The next day she came up with Maria, leaving her with us for a month while she tried to get things in order. Arthur had left no will; his business, a small publishing house, had been largely in his head. Liz and Arthur had a joint bank account and at Arthur’s death it was frozen; Liz had only the money in her pocket, and had to borrow from friends to get through the next few weeks.

  During the summer Maria came to us again. All of Maria’s few birthdays had been in Crosswicks, so we had the usual party under the apple trees, with balloons and presents tied to the branches, turning the tiny orchard into birthday trees. Before her wedding, Maria told me that the birthday trees are one of the happiest memories of her childhood, and this warms the cockles of my heart.

  Liz came up to Crosswicks to get Maria, and to rest for a few days. One evening toward bedtime, we went outdoors to watch for shooting stars and to talk. There was a bi
te in the air, and we took blankets and wore elderly fur coats which would be rejected by any thrift shop, coats we keep in the pantry hall for dog walking and star watching.

  We lay on the lawn on the north of the house, looking across a large pasture to the trees and the hills beyond. Liz told me that Arthur’s estate was almost settled, thanks to a lawyer friend, and that he had also drawn up a will for her. She was preparing to start rehearsals in an excellent role in a play that had every smell of a hit, and she was beginning to look toward the future with eagerness. She had left the theatre when Maria was born; she was returning now both because acting was her joy and because it was the way she had been trained to earn her living.

  A bright star fizzed across the sky and went out.

  Then Liz said, “If anything should happen to me—not that I expect it to—but if anything should, would you and Hugh take care of Maria? I know you love her, and would bring her up the way I want.”

  I told Hugh about the conversation and we forgot about it until the following November, one morning before dawn when the phone rang. The phone is on Hugh’s side of the bed, and he answered it.

  A phone call at that time of day usually means something wrong, and I could tell from Hugh’s shocked voice that it was not a wrong number or anything unimportant. He said, “Liz is dead.”

  During rehearsal the day before, she had been stricken by a bad headache which rapidly became worse. It was finally so bad that the stage manager took her home in a cab. Her mother was minding Maria, and opened the door. The stage manager said, reassuringly, “It’s a bad headache. The theatre doctor has given her some medication, and she’ll feel better soon.”

  It was not just a bad headache; it was a cerebral hemorrhage, and Liz was dead before morning.

  Liz died on the twenty-sixth of November. The funeral was on the twenty-ninth: my birthday.