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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 3
by
Jennifer Wijdenes
During their study, Kranz and Daniluk found that seventy-one percent of their respondents “found comfort in their memories of their mothers and in their belief that they would be together again in the future” (3). Like L’Engle, the women in their study recognized the importance of looking back at the lives of their mothers in order to gain solace in the aftermath of realizing that, for the first time in their lives, their mother is not a living, breathing part of their world. On this thought, L’Engle writes a faith-based observation that “only death will give me back my mother” (225). What remains in the world after a person dies are the memories of how they lived their life. The responsibility of preserving a mother’s memory falls on the surviving daughter who retells recollections of her mother while hoping for a day of spiritual reunion, and L’Engle’s belief that death will ultimately act as a conduit for reunion with her loved ones (Kranz and Daniluk 3). L’Engle further concurs with Kranz and Daniluk in their assessment that if the final moment of life is a good one, women who “know that their mother died peacefully without fearfully anticipating her own death helped assuage their sense of loss” (8). In the moment that L’Engle discovered that her mother died she was told, “Grandmother was alive, and then she was dead. I’m not sure how I knew. I just knew. There was none of the pain she had feared” (227). In this, L’Engle is comforted. She visually memorializes the final moment of her mother’s life as a good and peaceful one which reads as a nearly indiscernible and gentle transition from one place to another.
Throughout her autobiography, L’Engle weaves recollections of domestic acts, her strong Christian faith, and the ways that her family communicates to paint an incredibly vivid picture of her religious practices and family structure. For instance, she often reflects on how prayer and psalm reading was an integral part at her parents’ dinner table during her growing up years. She draws on this familial tradition during her mother’s funeral by noting that the “words of the burial service are familiar to me, are part of my roots” (240). In a sense, she is acting in response to what Brown describes as a spiritual feminine missionary personality. Brown, in her article, suggests that Mary Hawes taps into this aspect of personality through the faith example provided by her father and “[the] need to examine the meaning of death, whether it signified a final end, a temporary separation, or transcendence for families in the past. Understanding the place of death in the life cycle illuminates not only individual lives and families, but also reveals the interaction between family and society” (368). For L’Engle, the role of family faith traditions, when worked in concert with everyday domestic acts such as eating a meal, sets up a life-long tradition of seeing the importance of simple, almost mystical practices that she draws on at the time of her mother’s death. She describes it thus: “This time out of time in the absolute familiarity of the living room is healing and redemptive for me… the mystery by which I live” (233). Places create memories and people occupy the heart. In this sense, the deeply rooted faith practices of L’Engle’s family construct a present tabernacle of refuge and a hope for eventual reunion with her mother.
For L’Engle, the self-revelation and examination of her grief in the present while writing her autobiography and how it relates to her past act as a catharsis. A prolific writer, L’Engle ritually relies on creative writing whenever she wants to contextualize or understand an emotional response to her mother’s slow demise. This often manifests itself in spontaneous acts of composing poetry. L’Engle recalls writing “three poems to help push [her] through” the visceral days immediately following her mother’s death (240).
According to Annabelle Fersch, one of the essential aspects of autobiographical writing is that the reader becomes “enmeshed in the present of the narrative past . . . for it is only then that the reader can become aware that the narrator is recording the past as [she] perceives it in the present” (69). Thereby, the self-writer must reactivate the re-telling of her own past in order to allow the process of writing to function as something transcendent of the truth of now. Throughout the final summer of her mother’s life, L’Engle writes her way through the grueling process of watching her mother die ever using a genuine, incisive and intuitive pen. To illustrate this point, she recalls, “I wrote the next day, I know I’ve left out all kinds of important things. . . and besides we’re terribly tired still, emotionally and mentally” (57). Writing about the important things of the truth of now, specifically the death of her mother and her reaction to it, enable L’Engle to be kind to herself during a time of extreme physical and emotional exhaustion.
Although writing is birthed as an interior activity, very personal, and often isolating from others, L’Engle believes that “a story should be something like the earth, a blazing fire at the core, but cool and green on the outside” (137). However, the expression of grief is not always best experienced when “cool and green.” It must often become as raw as a “blazing fire.” Fersch suggests the importance of achieving an authentic writing “style” and deconstructs the importance of form and the writing voice in her article “V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and the Art of Re-reading.” She suggests that the writer must “assign to a reader only two common characteristics: the ability to sympathize with a character and to get caught up in a story. . . There is a common ground upon which the text can pre-structure the reader’s response” (69). This concept easily relates to L’Engle’s use of writing as catharsis in that she desires her reflections and examinations about the loss of her mother to connect to others. Throughout The Summer of the Great Grandmother, she maintains a careful balance between sharing eloquent and specific emotional self-revelation with an identifiable style that allows the reader to join in her grief process. In this, L’Engle’s catharsis through writing comes from sharing and re-telling the reader about the effects of her mother’s death in ways that encourage a shared feminine experience of losing one’s mother.
Writing not only functions as a catharsis for L’Engle’s grief, but also as a tool to recall her mother. In this vein, she cites the ancient Hebrew belief that the “ultimate hell consisted in being forgotten, erased from the memory of family and tribe, from the memory of God” (234-35). People want to know that their life lessons will be remembered once they have physically died, because the notion of being forgotten and erased from the world is a frightening prospect which elicits a need to preserve our ancestors’ stories in the hopes that ours will likewise be preserved by future generations. However, in order to memorialize an individual, it is important have known the deceased intimately and thoroughly.
In their article, “Lifelong Legacy of Early Maternal Loss: A Woman’s Group,” Cynthia Pill and Judith L. Zabin discuss the ways that women who lost their mothers at a young age were unable to express their grief and desperately looked for ways to construct a picture of their mother or primary identification object in spite of a lack of tangible memories. Pill and Zabin suggest that the women in their study group “postponed” the experience of grief because they had so few actual memories that their personal identities were fragmented. Such is not the fate of L’Engle who moved in close relationship to her mother for more fifty years.