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

  Almost two months since his death. I hate time rushing him away. And I am still numb, except in flashes. I get along adequately, if automatically. I sleep, most of the time, a little better and don’t need as much help from sedatives. Of course, I usually wake at least once at night and sit up and read for an hour or so. But there is some gain.

  I think I am further away from the actual trauma of the last days: the death itself, the emaciated body. But I am still in his illness. The terrible period of disappointed hopes when he came back from the hospital and then each day got weaker and could do less, although he tried so hard to do something: work at clearing up his office when he could only get up the stairs carrying books and letters in a basket, because he had to hold onto the banisters with one hand, pulling himself up.

  I mind that I did not give him more sympathy, more extravagant expression of love. But we were both hanging on to our self-control, to our hopes. Pity or too much sympathy would have broken us down, would have been a betrayal. But I mind.

  I am glad for the week in Maui; it also had such sharing. There was no veil between us because he knew he was dying. We could talk to him whenever he wanted. We were terribly driven the first week, all of us. He wanted to arrange every detail of his burial and had us taking notes and running here and there, thinking only about the grave, the coffin, the stone marker, the service. (This was a relief, because it was in another world than the material.)

  After it was reasonably in order—the grave all done, the stone planned, the coffin, its lining, his clothes, covering, etc. settled—he felt relieved. I am glad I then broke through and spoke about death and what he could tell us. I said that it would help us because we would have to face it—I, first of all.

  He said, “I don’t feel I’m ‘facing’ anything. And it’s not what you think. I know I have been near death at least three times this week. It’s not terrible. It’s very easy and natural. I don’t think it’s the end. I think I’ll go on, in a more generalized way, perhaps. And I may not be so far away, either.”

  I am glad I told him that I had been praying for him, and for me, sitting in the little white church while Land and Jon worked on the grave. Although, at my telling, his face contorted with emotion, trying not to cry.

  And this after he had been cross at me. He was cross, naturally. He was so fragile, so weak, on such an edge all the time, and his rest and sleep were so important. And I was so overanxious and overfussy. When I came into the room and saw him with a bare shoulder or back and the wind blowing on him (with pneumonia), I would put the sheet over him. I had to do something, I felt. And he would bark out, “Put it back the way it was! You must understand. I need to rest. I am not being unreasonable …”

  But, of course, he let out his frustration on me, not the nurse. That is natural. Who else could he let out his terrible frustration on? Only someone he was as sure of as me.

  It was terrible to have him cross, as if his character, or our relationship, had changed. I could hardly bear it. But later he would say—yes, this time, choking with tears—“I feel so awful to have hurt you.” And I could hold his hand and, to his saying he was sorry, say obliquely what I couldn’t say directly: “You don’t have to say ‘I’m sorry.’ I feel the way Scott did when he was a little boy, with his great eyes looking at me solemnly, saying ‘You don’t have to say “I’m sorry” to me, Mother. You don’t ever have to say “I’m sorry.” I love you so much, you don’t have to say “I’m sorry.” ’ ”

  I could give Charles that. Perhaps because I had sat in the little church that day and prayed that I might be more gentle and less anxious, and that I would be given a chance, another night, twenty-four hours more, to show my gentleness and love. And it was given. And the understanding of his frustration was given, by remembering how babies always count on their mothers to understand and forgive their tantrums. Only with their mothers do they trust enough to let off steam. And the memory of my child’s wonderful answer to me was given to me to give back to C. I am grateful for that.

  It has suddenly gotten very cold, unseasonably so. I have been doing all the year-end jobs, the out-of-doors ones. They are the easiest to do, even the ones we did together: draining the hoses, putting them away, potting the begonias for indoors, taking the geraniums (what are left) inside, digging in the bedraggled chrysanthemums in pots by the door. There is a kind of companionship doing these jobs, even alone, that is so different from the desk work—which I avoid as long as possible and only do with the greatest difficulty.

  However, when I had to go down into the “bomb shelter”* to turn off the garden water line, armed with his written instructions, I was shaken. His instructions were so precise, so detailed, but also—which I’d forgotten—so humorous! They have that kind of slightly sarcastic tone, poking fun at the dumb woman plumber—like his instructions on the pressure cooker: “Note: If the above directions have been carried out exactly all will be hunky-dory. But it is possible that if the two emergency switches at the head of the stairs are observed with thoughtfulness, certain disturbing questions will arise …” etc. He was having such fun writing those instructions!

  Humor is the hardest thing to remember, but if you leave it out of the picture all reality is gone. It is the vital ingredient.

  The other night as I was cooking my supper, I looked out of my dark kitchen window that has the bird-feeding tray attached to it. There was a funny animal hunched up there, obviously eating. What was it? Not a squirrel: too fat and pale-colored. Not a cat: too small and a long hairless tail. A rat? No, not with that long-haired sandy gray coat. Then I saw its little pointed long-nosed face, white with pink at the tip of the nose, two small black ears like crumpled pansy petals, and pink again, at the tips. “Obviously a possum!” It didn’t seem to mind me at all. Looking right at me through the partly shaded lighted window, it went on eating with its little black-fingered hands.

  I watched fascinated and delighted and felt how pleased he would have been. What was it eating? I went downstairs to read in the encyclopedia. It said possums are marsupial, carrying their young in pouches, and that the newborn possum after “maturition” crawls “without help from its mother” into her pouch where a nipple immediately swells with milk and the lucky baby settles down until it can feed itself. (This possum had no baby—no pouch.) Possums eat, the encyclopedia said, small insects, eggs, fruit, berries, etc. Nothing like that was on my shelf, only wormy crackers and melba toast which I’d cleared out of the cupboard. It has come now two or three nights in succession and evidently enjoys melba toast—or worms!

  I find things C. S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed very apt. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” I am also reading a new edition of Chekhov’s letters which came out last year. It is wonderful: lively, and astonishingly current in a way. But he was such a modern man: humane, witty, anti-clerical, anti-political, pro-feminist, anti-prudery, pro-sexual freedom, etc. A down-to-earth doctor, a witty and compassionate observer of people and situations, and always an artist, astute and critical of himself and others. He was so real, so honest, perceptive, and so in touch with life and suffering. It is so difficult to find anything to read that is quite right, something that is not escape, that is related to life and death, but that does not offer false or esoteric comfort. Teilhard de Chardin’s letters would be the best; there are several other collections of his letters that I cannot seem to get, besides the three I have.

  Last night for the first time I slept through the night without a sleeping pill, though I did take a mild sedative and had to read quite late. And this morning I woke to a beautiful mild fall day. I went out and sat on the old overturned boat and looked up at the sky above the crooked pine: so alive it was, with gently twirling leaves, with flocks of birds going south, with white comet-tails from distant planes, with soaring gulls motionless above far trees, with wisps of cloud substance, the early makings of a cloud.

  Meditating on the boat bottom, I felt a great sense of oneness with t
he earth and the earth cycles, and a sense of closeness to him also and gratitude for his life and his love and all the things he had given me and that we shared. Particularly this morning, I felt gratitude for the sky. (“You will have the sky!” as Mother said to me when I first told her I was engaged to marry, so long ago.) Yes, I have had the sky, and have it still, and feel an almost greater sense of it than before. I understand more his love of it and feel one with him in that.

  I know these moments of joy, of release, are due to many things. Partly that I am stronger after two months. I sleep more, I don’t wake as often with those terrible nightmares or the less terrible but still sharp pains of indigestion knotting my stomach—nervous indigestion, of course, but still painful. Partly I am stronger, partly one is better on a beautiful day.

  It has been a beautiful fall and I have been nourished by all I have done around the place. I find a kind of satisfaction in doing the clearing-up jobs we used to do together. Strange, you’d think I’d miss him more here. Gathering sticks in a wheelbarrow to stack for kindling, emptying the hoses, turning off the garden water: it is as if we were still doing them together, as if he were going on in me.

  I feel, in a not at all spiritualistic way, that he is “at my side” when I’m working like this. I cannot explain it rationally, but it is nourishing and comforting. Perhaps I feel grateful for all he had taught me to do, all the practical things. As Reeve said, “He prepared us so well for his death.” I don’t really feel this at the desk though. There I feel painfully alone and inadequate. I feel I am wading through molasses, I do it so inefficiently and slowly. Perhaps I feel his impatience here, even disapproval, at the way I am doing it.

  Yesterday was such a beautiful day that I worked all afternoon outside (some desk work in the morning and evening—that was all), raking and hoeing up the bad patches in the lawn and reseeding and putting peat moss around. And planting bulbs. All that outside work must have helped to give me such a good night’s sleep.

  It is not that I live “happily.” It is not happiness. There is mostly unhappiness. One plods along heavily, carrying that constant burden of loss, of emptiness, of unexpressed grief. (If I could only cry more! But I am dry-eyed—a dry-eyed ache most of the time.) It is worst at night, especially at suppertime.

  But there are moments of joy, like this morning on the boat, or last night at sunset, going down to feed the swan family. (How big the two gray cygnets have grown. They survived the summer. He didn’t.)

  Autumn, I think, is a good time to meet grief and loss. The tide is going out. One is in harmony with the dying and receding of nature, because one is in this part of the cycle oneself. But it is comforting also because one works in the expectation of new life to come. One works for the continuation of life. It is like working with children. I think it would—it will—be harder to meet the spring, when everything is bursting with blossoms and growth and fecundity: the time of love and mating and nesting.

  No mail and no papers came since it was Veterans Day. Last year we were in Birmingham. It made him happy to be honored by all the [armed] services. He was already ill, but I am glad he was able to do it. I had dreaded it (the open car parade!) but it was moving and fun to do it, once more with him, a last repetition of that early aviation life, and early married life too.

  Mother B. (abbess of Regina Laudis Monastery) called. It was so good to hear her voice and though we spoke very little, really, a word or two, I felt connected again with some deeper level I always feel at the monastery. And when I put the phone down I could cry: blessed healing tears. The dry-eyed parched aridity was broken for a few minutes. I went back to the desk and read—or reread—Jon’s letter to me that ends with the lines from a poem by St. Colombo: “Oh, my love, my God, may Thy blood flow in my heart. Who but Thee can give me tears?”

  I don’t know that I understand it completely, or at all. I only know that it strikes an inner chord and releases me. The need for tears is great.

  I go to sleep about midnight and wake almost an hour later, shaken by a deep and troubling dream. This time I uncover it before it disappears: he is in bed and I am trying to get him something he wanted to eat. How happy I was when I could find a soup, a zwieback, a stewed fruit that he liked! But the dream—or waking up from it—was not happy. I suppose it is the waking up, the remembering, that is so terribly painful, unbelievable and shattering all over again.

  We have been having an unusually warm, mild week. Most of the brilliant leaves are off the trees, though the maples are still golden and the oaks a deep russet. No wind, still, warm as spring. One by one the leaves fall, spiraling gently to the ground. Sometimes I think they’re birds fluttering down. Sometimes they come in a rush and a rattle like rain. It is good weather to be languidly out of doors, raking or digging in bulbs.

  Kristina is here this weekend. She is very sympathetic and easy. I am interested in her life and like to talk to her. She is sensitive, aware, articulate, with a lovely sense of humor and no pose, direct, something always of country about her, woods, fields, winds and water. She has moods, but there is an air blowing through the moods.

  A wet fall Sunday. Kristina and I had a good walk yesterday in the mild damp golden afternoon. (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”*—this year we have had a European fall.) Then I dug in twelve more tulips at the front of the house, bordering the bushes, before tea and some talk about her life and her family, and supper on the sofa. She is very easy and companionable.

  I had a much better sleep, right through from about midnight to 5:30, and then back off for another hour’s nap after some reading in bed. I woke shortly after eight from a very vivid dream, not cloaked this time, but clear as a cry in its symbolism.

  I was in a warehouse, or perhaps my own house in a state of moving. Desks, papers, letters, and old magazines were dustily piled everywhere in confusion. I suddenly realized that I had lost my wedding ring. I got down on the floor to try and find it with my hands, feeling on the bare wood; it must be nearby because I had heard it click falling. Nancy came by, because we were to go somewhere together. I rushed up to her and said, “Nancy, the most dreadful thing has happened.” But to her expression of sympathy, I said, “Well, not so terrible, but hard. I’ve lost my wedding ring.”

  “Oh,” she said, firmly and practically, “we’ll find it,” and set about looking among the piles of dusty papers. “I know what wedding rings mean to one’s family.” But as she looked among the papers, I knew she couldn’t find it there. “It can’t be there,” I said, “in the papers, because I heard it click as it fell.”

  I woke up then with some relief to find I still had my wedding ring, and it was another loss.

  So very strange how the unconscious cloaks its messages so that they are acceptable. Freud said dreams are the guardians of sleep. This dream was the clearest I’ve had, well enough masked that I could remember it. But why Nancy? (Her husband is ill with cancer too.) The stacks of dusty papers in confusion are clearly what I am living in now. No, I won’t refind my marriage among them. And perhaps they are hiding the “ring” from me—keeping me from finding it.

  One keeps looking. Dana got me his wallet from the safe-deposit vaults in the hospital. I had been dreading the trip to the hospital for it, the first time since his death, and dreading opening the sealed envelope too. Yet, still, hoping to find something of him in it, something undiscovered, some secret messages.

  When I finally opened it at home, there was nothing significant: a poor passport picture, a little money, some addresses, his driver’s license, a folded sheet of blue paper with some numbers on it—his [Pan Am airline] pass numbers and Social Security number, the safe combination. I felt numbly disappointed. He is not here either.

  January 7th, 1980

  Dearest Scott:

  I tried to call you yesterday, Sunday, at about 2:30 my time, which I assumed was 8:30 your time. The bell rang and rang and I imagined I had called too late and you were in the big room watching television. I
shall try again today.

  Nothing in particular to say, only I feel it has been a long time since I heard anything, and I feel out of touch. This is my fault more than yours since I have not written and there are always so many duty letters to get through that any personal ones get pushed aside.

  I feel I have been racing ever since I got back from Switzerland. Reeve and I made two trips out west this last fall, one to Minnesota for a Historical Society meeting. This was combined with a Lindbergh Fund* meeting, a first one in Minnesota, which we have been working toward for several years. Reeve, Jim Newton, Jim Lloyd, and Land, in particular, have been pushing to get the fund down off its New York “charity ball” basis, onto a more solid and less spectacular but more practical level, based in Minnesota; they are very down-to-earth and sympathetic to your father’s point of view of a balance between technology and conservation.

  At one of the meetings I had to make a speech and answer questions (some interesting—some not). And there was a discussion in which Land and Reeve took part. When Land was asked, “What does it feel like to be a son of a famous person?” he answered, “I have no basis of comparison. I’ve only had one childhood!”)

  I really want to know how you are, and how Alika is, and if you have had any answers to the letters you sent out last summer, and what the visit was like from the editor of International Wildlife magazine. (Was that the magazine that was sending someone to interview you?) I want to know how the monkeys are, and if you have done any more writing on your thesis. (Don’t feel guilty about it. Theses take forever and you are doing so much outside work.) I cannot say that I have done any writing since this summer. There are still bits and patches of extra writing that turn up in connection with the last volume.† It all seems very far in the past, with the appalling series of crises we are into at this moment in Iran and Afghanistan. Actually the Iranian crisis and Carter’s handling of it has brought about quite a resurgence of patriotism in this country as well as upgrading Carter’s popularity.