The Extraordinary, Ordinary Lindberghs

At a program at Wisdom House on May 10 that explored her memories of her mother, author Reeve Lindbergh recounted the extraordinary and the ordinary in her experiences of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was an aviation pioneer and a writer as well as a mother of five children.

Anne and her husband Charles, were a spirited couple with a shared passion for life. Charles and Anne imbued in their children compassion, confidence, curiosity and a spirit of adventure and fun.

Reeve's contribution to the Lindbergh's story is to translate it for us, to demythologize her parents, to make them real, to take us into the Lindbergh living room on a Sunday afternoon and genuinely feel part of the family as her father makes his lists and moves with economy and precision and her mother steps out into her small writing studio to work. Reeve's stories take you home.

Many of the 50 women in the room shared a personal connection with the family, with the family's story, or with the books of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. (I have one, too--my mother went to school with Scott Lindbergh, and my great-grandfather was the family's plumber.)

For my mother I bought a copy of No More Words, Reeve's memoir of caring for her mother during the last year of Anne's life. Leafing through it during a coffee break, I read Reeve's words about her mother's helping her through the death of her son Jonny, who died of encephalitis before he was two: "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.'"

Only a New Englander could have written that, I thought as I read it--terse, true, straight, and clearly focused on the kind of surviving that leads to thriving. And then I thought: Only a wise and compassionate mother could speak thus to her daughter; and only a genuine soul could give the words away.

Reeve Lindbergh makes the adventure, the mystery, the romance, and the sorrow of her extraordinary family seem ordinary. Perhaps they are. Perhaps those passions exist within each of us though only in some of us do they ever take flight.

Reeve Lindbergh reflects on her mother, Ann Morrow Lindbergh.

Reeve Lindbergh talks about her father, Charles Lindberg.