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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
The Most Ordinary of Deaths: Madeleine L’Engle’s Autobiographical Examination of the Death of Her Mother - Page 2
by
Jennifer Wijdenes
The death of her mother prompts L’Engle to review both of their lives by first looking at old family photos and then recording family stories passed down for generations by word of mouth, and thereby, inadvertently elevating her mother’s legacy. L’Engle also examines her association to her mother and extended family in context to her name and how it relates to her legacy. The maternal grandmother, for whom she was named, “probably had the strongest influence in [L’Engle’s mother’s] life. . . and spoke most often of Mado when she was depressed because Mado, even in recollection, brought the gift of laughter” (164-165). Similarly, Karen Kranz and Judith Daniluk suggest that most women see the “importance of keeping their mothers’ legacies alive in their lives and the lives of their children” (16). This act of preserving one’s legacy forces mothers and daughters to draw closer and know each other intimately.
In their article, “Gone But Not Forgotten: The Meaning and Experience of Mother-Loss for Midlife Daughters,” Kranz and Daniluk report on a study about “how women in midlife experience and meaningfully construct the recent death of their mothers” within a 2-5 year period post-mortem (1). They found that “many of the daughters (in their study) reflected on how often they tried to define themselves as being different from their mothers. However, after their mothers were no longer part of their lives, they found themselves striving to integrate aspects of their mothers into their own identities,” thus resulting in a self-constructed maternal legacy (12). Legacies provide a way to pass on a piece of ourselves to the future generations and also impart genealogical family wisdom and anecdotes. L’Engle speaks of the “fourth generation [of Madeleines]” in the sense that her name is connected both backwards to her mother and grandmother, forwards to her granddaughter, and perhaps even to her unborn great-grandchildren (4). This creates a unique and particularly rooted connection between name and legacy.
L’Engle approaches her mother’s mortality by using objects and storytelling iconically in order to carry out what Irene Quenzler Brown terms as mourning practices. Brown believes that the process of grief “can be a good one only if we have our own survival routines. Each one of us must manage to find a time of solitude and privacy” (46). However, societal dictates often try to force inappropriate or generic mourning practices upon us. In their article, “The Social Context of Grief Among Adult Daughters Who Have Lost a Parent,” Jennifer Klapper, Sidney Moss, Miriam Moss and Robert L. Rubinstein describe the transition of losing a mother as being socially motivated. They discuss the way that social trends affect the “transition and expression” of grief and how the “socio-culture milieu” influences our responses when grieving (31). We are taught that grief must follow all things “proper” in order to be conquered. Far too often, individuals use the mass society to inform the ways that they process their personal losses (Klapper, et al 30-31).
For L’Engle, societal influences are not as impacting as are familial and faith traditions in the formation of her mourning practice. By using self-writing as an integral part of the mourning process, she is enabled to anticipate, accept, process and reexamine the death of her mother by looking at how her mother faced death. Recalling the pleasure her “well-read” mother took in memorizing and retelling stories “ranging from Plato and the Bible to romantic novelists” helps L’Engle begin to accept her mother’s impending and eventual death because she understands that her mother has lived a personally satisfying life (187). L’Engle analytically describes her mother’s “Bible, some yellowed letters, a few pieces of once beautiful furniture… the mystery of ousia which helps me to see a little more clearly through the dimness of human understanding” (181). These mementos became the key objects that help ground L’Engle’s beliefs and values because they function as iconic and symbolic thereof.
In her essay, “Death, Friendship, and Female Identity During New England’s Second Great Awakening,” Brown frames and uses the term mourning practices to discuss the ways that 19 th century women approached the loss of a loved one through the study of Mary Hawes, the daughter of a missionary. Hawes uses the date on a pin to separate her “childhood, maidenhood, and family of origin” in a way that acts both as catalyst for time and emotion (368). The pin as object also serves as an intermediary for the grieving process while Hawes deals with the death of four of her siblings. In Hawes’ case, the object becomes the connection that memorializes the dead. Thus, the object enables her to construct a unique and suitable mourning practice. In L’Engle’s case, she states that the act of reexamining “family portraits meant a great deal to me, not as an aide to ancestor worship, but as beacons to guide me” (196). By looking at iconic reminders of the dead, L’Engle, like Hawes, memorializes her mother in context to her place in the larger family using iconic objects.
In seeking to demystify her mother through an authentic and honest assessment of how her mother shapes her own identity through her claim that “the most ordinary of deaths is the death of a parent,” L’Engle merges the experiences of death and self-searching into a type of myth or canonization of her mother (29). This form of maternal assessment could be likened to what Kranz and Daniluk term as a life review, and which they describe as being “the need [for daughters] to rework their understanding of their relationships with their mothers after their deaths” (15). They describe the subtle ways that women construct ideals about what motherhood should represent and “their belief that death occurs for meaningful reasons” (8). In this vein, L’Engle believes that part of life’s meaning is that “we are supposed to share all of life with each other, dying and decay as well as feasting and fun,” and herein she demystifies her mother by viewing her realistically, honestly, and wholly (28).
Kranz and Daniluk would respond to L’Engle’s direct examination of her mother’s life by explaining this as part of a “process of stepping back and widening the lens [in order to reflect] on the nature of her relationship with her mother and her role within this relationship” (8). In order to lay bare the aspects of her own personality, L’Engle must also demystify her role as daughter and woman in order to “recreate meaning in [her own] life” (Kranz and Daniluk 11). Using this approach, Kranz and Daniluk’s research found that the death of a mother can be considered as a “gift in opening the door for her to embrace the spiritual aspects of life” (11). L’Engle does just this: She relies on her faith as she reexamines the meaning and direction of her life in the expressive form of writing as self-examination.
The storing and examination of memories becomes an important part of L’Engle’s process for letting her mother slide from tangible, living person into a place of gentle remembrance, and how her faith intercedes in accepting her mother’s death. Analyzing memory acts as a key in the process of letting her mother go, and she writes, “When I needed memory of that summer for my story, my subconscious mind, with a porcupine-like flick, flipped it up out of the water for me. And I’m still young enough… that an enormous underwater treasure trove is available to me” (90). L’Engle realizes that her role as a daughter mourning her mother’s death, while at a reasonably young age, affords her the ability to tap into the past in order to retell it to her contemporaries and to record it for the future.
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