So much of my life goes into sorting the mail: answering letters or worrying about them; requests—saying NO—politely; throwing away begging letters, appeals, advertisements; clearing up clutter, which keeps accumulating—newspapers, magazines. A lot of it is still the trailing glory of CAL: people who are writing books about him, or want to interview me about his, or our, lives, or people who met him once and want an autograph or some book signed or some comment verified. It takes time, it adds clutter and it deadens one to real life—one’s own life. Has one not a right to one’s own life?
I have also become a kind of matriarch. Children, grandchildren, cousins, friends who knew me once. This is my life and I want to be open to them—but is it my life?
Little House
A gray and cold Monday, January 10th, 1983 [DIARY]
I am afraid of any new writing. It does not come easily. I have tried sporadically to write about age, widowhood, living alone. There are many thoughts written down, but they will not come together in a form. They are not a book. A notebook perhaps? What am I afraid of? Afraid of failing? Afraid of facing the end of my writing—a period of aridity without writing? But I am not totally arid; when I am moved to writing a letter to a widow or talking to a troubled woman or man, living alone, I can give out something I still have to give. There is a spring there, still flowing—but only for people. I cannot do it in the abstract, in solitude.
Once, of course, I had people: a husband, a family of children. They fed my need for people. Now I live alone; I need people and am stimulated by them. Once I needed solitude to write; now there is too much solitude. I fill it with duties, anything to fill up the vacuum.
What do I enjoy in my day? I am appalled at my list: putting out seed for the birds, or suet, and watching them peck at it; walking with my dog and looking at the bare trees against the sky; I like seeing or talking to my children on the telephone, but that doesn’t happen every day; getting into a warm bed at night with a good book; listening to a good concert on the radio. I don’t particularly like eating or cooking though. I love my tea at five after the walk, and my cheese and wine before supper. Of course, I like seeing people when I can. Going out to someone’s house for tea or supper always stimulates me—or having a friend or friends come to me.
There is not too much of this, except chatting on the telephone, but there is more than there was in my first years of widowhood. It is really a rather bleak life, devoid of people. Once a week I go into New York and see people—the reading group—but I am exhausted driving back in the traffic (especially in the winter’s short days and bad weather), and usually exhausted the next day.
I am happy if I feel I have helped someone in a crisis in life (or even not a crisis) to see their lives more clearly. Sometimes I feel this after a talk with Elsie, my neighbor, or with Anne B., a younger friend, or one of my old secretaries (who become surrogate daughters)—a talk over tea, or walking. The Darien discussion group is a new opening and quite stimulating, though more psychological than the group in New York (which is older, and is made up of women struggling with the problems of age, illness and loss). These women in Darien are still looking for their “identity.” (And Dr. Davidoff,* who directs them, is passionately devoted to helping women to that end—passionately and compassionately.) I feel I am beyond that age and desire.
I am happiest when I am helping others to live: the visit from Barbara after Christmas, with Morgan, her youngest. I do not know whether I helped or not: I listened and was impressed with what she had worked through after the blow of separation from Jon. I was there to understand and to admire and to love her. This is, again, the mother-daughter relationship; to do this occasionally is enough to live for.
Little House
Tuesday, March 22nd, 1983 [DIARY]
What happened to January? And February? On January 24th Reeve’s baby, Jonathan Lindbergh Brown, was born. Richard called me that morning and I went up the next day. Rosemary drove me in her car, staying overnight in her Vermont house and driving down the next day. I took boxes of food, and casseroles Mrs. Swan had cooked, and frozen and fresh vegetables, bread and fruit, so I would not have to shop or cook much. I was afraid of the driving in snow in Reeve’s car. I was nervous about this grandmothering stint, wondering if I would be equal to it physically. I hadn’t done it for eight years (Susannah’s birth was eight years ago, the first winter after CAL’s death). But I was stronger then, eight years younger. Would I be able to be on my feet that much—all day, as Reeve is in her daily life? But once I arrived in the Vermont house I felt like another person.
It was, of course, a very joyous period. The first son, and Reeve so safely through the experience—which had some possible dangers, for a late baby, and after her two difficult years, one following her own surprising “seizure” (due to scar tissue from the concussion seven years before) and the resulting drugs she had to take. And that year followed by Richard’s broken back and operation and long and painful healing process. Those were two painful years and hard on them both, but they survived and with the new baby, life had straightened out. Reeve seemed so well and took the birth in a relaxed way. Richard could now walk and is out of pain, though still must be very careful. The baby was perfect in health and looks: a calm and comfortable baby, and sturdy.
I have written a sketchbook piece about this baby’s homecoming, but it does not describe my sense of renewal from the ten days in that happy family. I felt I was back in the river of life again. I was needed. I was used.
Lizzy and Susannah were eager to help, to hold the baby, to rock him. I trembled somewhat to see him in Susannah’s arms like a big doll. But Reeve was not nervous and she taught them carefully and brought them into the special circle around a new baby and mother. They must not be left out.
It was a privilege to hold the baby and carry him upstairs. Once I was worried when I heard Susannah fall at the top of the stairs and break into sobs. But before I could get to her, Lizzie was there next to her, on her knees, the baby safely in her arms, not crying.
“Don’t cry, Susannah, the baby is all right. He isn’t crying. See? He’s all right.” I thought this was extraordinary of an older sister, to comfort rather than to capitalize on her younger sister’s fault: instead of using the incident to build up her own role in taking care of the baby, she was being mother to Susannah as well as the baby. Lizzie was, of course, very careful and gentle with the baby—and very proud and happy to be trusted.
The days went swiftly and happily and I lived on many levels, remembering my own babies and my mother or Miss Waddington at my side. I thought too of CAL. What was there of him in this child? And of my first baby. There was something very familiar about this child but whom he resembled I couldn’t pin down.
It was hard to leave. I share so much with Reeve, but I knew I must leave the family to its own private circle.
March 24th [1983] [DIARY]
February went into great sadness in our reading group, with two of our members’ husbands dying of cancer at almost the same time. It is our age, I realize. Death is not really an accident any more. It is all around us. It always was, only we didn’t realize it. Now one is faced with it every day. Death from old age is not really a tragedy, but death from cancer does always seem a horror. There is—or seems to be—more and more of it, an epidemic almost, like the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
It is, or may be, easier for Margot, who is so convinced of life after death or some kind of reincarnation. I am—or remain most of the time—open to the possibility of some kind of survival of the spirit, but it is very vague and abstract. It is simply an open question in my mind, like the end of Lewis Thomas’s chapter on death.* What happens to the spirit? he asks, and follows with several rather inconclusive suppositions (or more questions), then states, “Nature doesn’t waste anything.” That is all we know.
The services, however, were a great help and very beautiful.
I want to be cremated, but not buried in a can like Aunt
Edith—scattered to the winds, in a loved place, under a tree. And I want my service to be traditional and abstract, not personal. No eulogies. Music (mostly Bach) and psalms, prayers and hymns (if anyone can sing). CAL’s service, reduced to a simpler form, would do. All this I have written out in my prayer book. And I want to die at home, and not to have my illness, if mortal, prolonged by life-sustaining machinery. Pain should be relieved as much as possible, even if it shortens life. After this period of death and ashes, we have to go on living.
Corliss came out for lunch. I keep trying to see him as he was—is—a very old friend, but it is so unsatisfactory. Is this age, or illness, or my lack of anything in common with him any more? Perhaps in this case it is age and illness: he had a very serious illness over Christmas and was in the hospital for a heart operation. (They put a pig’s valve in his heart!) He said he feels much better, but I felt everything was an effort for him.
But it was not that exactly, but a kind of disconnectedness in our conversation. He seems very much there at one moment, discussing an editorial in the Times that day, and then not there at all when I talk to him about his work and his writing. There is very little personal talk or contact. Perhaps it is too painful for him. He is lonely, he says, so the only thing to do is work. If Helen had lived, would he have been like this? I felt very sad when he left, as if he were in full retreat.
There it is again. Mortality, so close to the surface—behind every face, every mask. One knows that under the thin crust of daily life lie the dark chasms: mortality, tragedy, separation, change. For the old, to sicken and die is not tragedy but normal life, but one would like them to die at home, in peace, without suffering or panic. When the young die, or even those in full life, it is accidental, a shock, an abnormality. At times like this, one crashes through the thin crust of daily life and faces the eternal sadness.…
Old photographs fall out. One of my mother, young, younger than I now am, with my first baby in her arms, holding up a twig for him to see. And then another, a close-up of the baby staring at me from that calm brow and wondering face. The great wise questioning eyes—so beautiful. I fall again into the pit of “the lost”—that tragic event. Why did it happen? Where did he go? Why?
Why to all the tragedies one reads about every day in the newspapers? The Holocaust, the tortures of civil wars, of El Salvador. (“They don’t waste bullets on the children”—just pick them up by the feet and dash their heads against the walls.) The slow cruelty of Communist prisons. The swift and careless cruelty of the atom bomb. We seem doomed. Religion has always said so but we have not believed it. We refuse to look beyond the show of daily life. An accidental detail can trip the spring and the trap-door opens beneath us—we fall into the abyss.
And yet sometimes, as at last Sunday’s concert, the opposite can happen: one rises above the daily movie. One reaches another level, one floats above, released by the oboe concerto of Telemann. This too is life.
Chalet Planorbe
July 21st, 1983 [DIARY]
June went to doctors, and dentist’s checkups. Then Ansy, Jerzy, and Marek came through en route to Maine for Con’s seventieth birthday reunion celebration. Margot and I flew up to Portland and then took a driver and cab to Rockland, stopping for provisions on the way. We are a large group farmed out in different houses.
The ferry at Rockland is just the same. We load our groceries into a friendly car going over. Ellen Hallowell (Pratt) is on the same ferry—quite unchanged, vigorous and open and warm, now a widow. She spends every summer on the island.
It is cool on the ferry and I watch the landmarks of the ride to North Haven: the Edward Hopper lighthouse, the “monument” buoys, the small green humps of the White Islands in the distance, and then narrowing into the thoroughfare, with the fields sloping down to the water and the old-fashioned summer houses overlooking the harbor.
The dock is full of people waving. Rhidian is there to meet us and we transfer groceries into a ranch wagon and drive off past Waterman’s store (the main street is now one way) and up the hill, around past the church, and down the dusty road to Pulpit Harbor. It is all full of memories and the next three days are more so.
The weather is very beautiful, hot by day and cool at night. I felt I was walking in a dream. I had forgotten how beautiful the place was: fields green, with tall grasses and daisies; dark pines against the sea; and the Camden Hills across the bay, with those green humps of islands strung out between us and the mainland. We had breakfast in our own houses and then wandered about meeting our children or grandchildren: Ansy strolling along casually, Charles* in blue jeans with a staff of driftwood he carries with him. Why? Is it a joke? Or a protection? Or a companion? We take a long hot walk in the woods toward the Cabots’ place where he talks to me about his computer projects, of which I understand very little but listen and ask questions because I am so fond of him.
The children are rehearsing a play (Annie) they are giving on the terrace of the Thatcher house. Children’s voices echo through the pine trees. Many of the cousins have not met before and pair up: Marek with Rhys Morgan, Anne and Wendy Fulenwider with Constance Pendleton, who runs the play.
What is extraordinary about this weekend are the different layers people are living on. Grandmothers and grandfathers are living half the time in the past, in happy memories, observing the young as the older generation once observed us. Fathers and mothers are busy, but delighting in the freedom of informal living and being relatively free of burdens, since children entertain each other. For the children, it is wild discovery of each other, of this new and yet familiar and safe-of-rules world. They are living totally in the present.
Yes, the beauty of the place helps one to live in the present. The song of the white-throated sparrow is hauntingly everywhere, or the sight of a white schooner rounding the bluff.
And Charles? In what world is he living? Not in the children’s world—nor in the adults’. In his own world of the mind, I think. I wish he had a companion.
There was one big dinner of neighbors, toasts, and speeches in the old dining room and playroom of the main house (rather too much for Aubrey, who left early), and the uproarious night of the play, Annie, performed by all the grandchildren on the terrace of the old house. Images: Annie, the waif who found good fortune, Wendy F.; Marek, Annie’s dog, on all fours; Lizzie B. as FDR with cigarette holder in jaw, pointed skyward; Susannah in high-heeled shoes, swinging hips as a sophisticated lady; and Connie P. as the brash, hard-hearted orphan asylum matron.
For me, the happiness was marred by the absence of Reeve, caught in Vermont with her baby home from the hospital in Hanover, but still terribly upset by his ordeal the week before: a virus infection, a high blood count, and various diagnoses of his reactions and complications.… Even after three weeks, he is unable to sleep and cries fitfully, although Reeve’s latest letter says he begins to sleep a little more at night.… Reeve and Richard are worn out. Fortunately their own pediatrician is encouraging and sees no sign of neurological disorder. I telephoned every morning from North Haven but although Reeve was calm, I had the uneasy feeling it was a terrible ordeal, as it was.
Back to Connecticut for the last five days of packing, shopping, dentist’s appointments and seeing people, the most important being Mina, who is, one must assume, dying; she has a blocked artery that nothing can be done about. She is very weak and stays in her bed, and looks ravaged. She is not in pain, only increasing bodily weakness. I go to see her, as I have several times this spring—as she evidently wants to see me. Driving up, I try to think of what I can bring her and what I can say. She does not want sympathy; she wants understanding. And she wants to express herself, to analyze, to be aware of what she is going through. For despite the physical frailty, she is mentally and psychologically supersensitive and alive. I was astonished and somewhat disturbed to have her talk so much, since she needs oxygen regularly when she feels overcome with weakness.
I began to understand, however, that she wanted
to explore, be aware of, and express what she was going through. She must explore the process of dying as she has always explored and expressed the process of living. I can listen, and I do, with the greatest interest and sympathy and admiration. I can also confirm her feelings, her stages in the process of dying with Charles’s experience, which she is eager to hear and finds reassuring.
She was taken out in her wheelchair to look at the garden, which had always meant so much to her, and now she was “beyond that.” She only wanted to get back in bed. I told her about Land pushing C., that last week in Maui, out to look at the waves dashing against the cliffs, a sight he loved most in Hawaii. But he by then was “beyond that” and only wanted to get back into his bed. Yet he wanted to talk to us about the process of dying. He said it was easy to die—he had been very close to it that past week, he said, it wasn’t anything “to face.” Mina was very interested and kept describing some of her sensations: to look at the bouquet of flowers on her bureau, and to want to change one flower (she who always made such exquisite flower arrangements), and to realize she did not have the strength to cross the room to the bureau. (I could identify with her in this and understood it.)