No More Words - A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Zusatztext Meg Laughlin The Miami Herald Intimate [and] down-to-earth...funny and engaging...honest. Informationen zum Autor Reeve Lindbergh is the author of several books for adults and children. They include the memoir of her childhood and youth, Under a Wing , No More Words , a description of the last years of her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Forward From Here, a memoir about entering her sixties. She lives with her husband, Nat Tripp, and several animals on a farm in northern Vermont. Klappentext Reeve offers a moving memoir of caring for her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, as she became debilitated and alienated from the world. Reeve's anguish and anxieties about her responsibilities are only part of the story, as beautifully written passages capture moments of humor and happiness and illuminate the profound, inviolable connection between mother and daughter. Chapter One: September 1999 I learned to know the world through words, but they were not my own. From the beginning of my life, as I remember it, everything I understood was made plain to me in her language, which I knew much better than my own. Her quiet voice, her exquisite gentle articulation, her loving eloquence, all of these things spoke me through my days, comforted my nights, and gave each hour of every twenty-four its substance, shape, and meaning from the time that I was born. She knew me well, and at each moment of my need, she spoke the words I needed. Sometimes the words were abstract, the language vague, but the message was always uncannily the right one for that instant. When I was a child -- the youngest of her five offspring -- and injured or unhappy, she would say, "Everybody loves you, Reeve!" and that was enough to draw the healing circle of affection around me and mend my trouble, whether it was a skinned knee or a bruised heart. When I was grown and had my own daughter, and reveled in the ecstatic connection between me as nursing mother and my baby at my breast, my mother watched us and told me, "It is, of course, the only perfect human relationship." This made me laugh, but at the same time, I believed her. I still do. Then later, when I lost my first son just before his second birthday, she who had also lost her first son knew what to say, and she was one of the few people I was willing to listen to. She told me the truth first. After I had found my baby's dead body one January morning, just after it was taken away but before the family had gathered together in shock and bewilderment to comfort one another, my mother said, "This horror will fade, I can promise you that. The horror fades. The sadness, though, is different. The sadness remains..." That, too, was correct. The horror faded. I left it behind me in that terrible winter, but the sadness remained. Gradually, over the years, it became a member of my family, like our old dog sleeping in the corners. I got used to my sadness, and I developed a kind of affection for it. I still have conversations with it on cloudy days. Come here, sadness, I say, come sit with me and keep me company. We've known each other for a long time, and we have nothing to fear from each other. But my mother was right. It does remain. At the time of my son's death, when I asked my mother what would happen to me as the mother of the child, how that part of me would continue, she said, "It doesn't. You die, that's all. That part of you dies with him. And then, amazingly, you are reborn." At the time, it was very hard to believe the last part of what she said, although I understood the dying part. It felt that way, certainly. I did not expect to feel any other way, ever again. But she was right again. I died with my first son, and then later, never thinking it could happen, I was reborn into a whole different life with my second. Sometimes I still hear my mother's voice in my head, tel...

Product details

• Authors: Reeve Lindbergh
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 08.10.2002
• EAN: 9780743203142
• ISBN: 978-0-7432-0314-2
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 13 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies