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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 1
by
Jennifer Wijdenes
Madeleine L’Engle is foremost a writer. For over fifty years, she has written in a wide range of styles including science fiction, poetry, prose, plays, religious devotionals, collegiate journals, and autobiography. L’Engle’s descriptive and personal narratives effectively reach across the generations, constantly shifting audiences from children to women, and from the Episcopalian community to academia. Her necessity to write amidst and about all seasons in life led to the composition of an autobiography based on her journals about the process of watching her mother die from atherosclerosis at age ninety-two. The Summer of the Great Grandmother is an extremely revealing and reflective autobiography, a poetic and gentle retelling of how L’Engle approached the final summer of her mother’s life in 1974. She composes her autobiography by retelling family stories in non-linear fashion that revisit her childhood and adult experiences with her mother and other family members in order to discover her place in the family tree. L’Engle thoughtfully constructs layers of cross-connected experiences to demystify the moment of her mother’s death using the strength of her Christian faith, the act of naming as self-identification in the larger family tree, the use of objects and her family’s tradition of storytelling to reexamine the course of her mother’s life, and the process of writing as catharsis. Through the sequence of self-exploration, L’Engle connects herself to the larger universe using the physical death of her mother to contextualize and better understand the meaning of her own life.
L’Engle sees herself as a woman viewing “death as the most ordinary thing in the world” and that “the most ordinary of deaths is the death of a parent” (29). Throughout her memoir, she is searching for her place in the world at large, but also in context to how she fits within the wonderful peculiarities of her own family: she is a soul searcher looking for the meaning of life as it relates to death. L’Engle hypothesizes that “there is symbolic meaning to being with a person you love all the way through to the end; there is validity in waiting while the coffin is let down into the open grave, in honoring someone’s mortal frame all the way” (240). In helping her mother approach death, she seeks to memorialize her in a way that allows memory to transcend remembrance until it is manifested in a tangible quality that resonates in her own life. L’Engle candidly writes that her “memory of Mother, which is the fullest memory of anybody living, is only fragmentary. . . I want to believe. . . that no atom of creation is ever forgotten by [God]; always is; cared for; developing; loved” (235). She is a writer on a quest to find her place in the cosmos, to incite personal growth, to memorialize her ancestors, and to know and believe that she is loved by God. In doing so, L’Engle reaches out to people universally. Although her autobiography is foremost told as a daughter’s story with many anecdotes from her own family stories and the practice of her Christian faith, L’Engle seeks to reach “people of all kinds, colors, ages” in order to discover herself more fully (239).
The fact that L’Engle shares her first name, Madeleine, with many other women in her family, enables her to look back throughout the family history in ways that connect her to dead relatives. Herein, she anticipates her own mother’s view on mortality: “Perhaps the great-grandmother [L’Engle’s mother] is as much afraid of the violence of a new birth as she is of the act of dying” (73). Following birth we are all named, while following resurrection, in the Christian faith, comes renaming. The earthly act of naming with its identifying nature and personalization often has its roots in genealogy. For L’Engle, naming as a means for connection to the larger familial whole functions as a way to create closeness to her mother. She recalls, “Mother’s name, like mine, came from her maternal great-grandmother” (165) and the name Madeline was shared and passed through “four-generations” (4). Inheriting the name Madeleine created a strong sense of family connection in L’Engle because the string of pre-Madeleines, including her mother, supported the younger, living Madeleines in an ever growing, ever dependant constellation of daughters, mothers and grandmothers. The impending death of her mother forces L’Engle to connect the living Madeleines: To this she writes, “There is a chill and empty feeling within me; nevertheless, there is something that impels me to put my arms around the Madeleine who is ninety and the Madeleine who has just turned three, and say, ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s all right’” (73). L’Engle connects this further by pondering, “How many people have been born, lived rich, loving lives, laughed and wept, been part of creation, and are now forgotten, unremembered by anybody walking the earth today?” (235). The act of naming helps to lay bare the fear of being forgotten by creating an inter-connectedness between generations past and future.
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