In 1929, Anne Spencer Morrow, a 23-year-old introverted intellectual, married a man who was, at the time, arguably the most celebrated person in the world. He was Charles Lindbergh, and his incredible solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 had catapulted him to a wild level of fame.
It was Charles Lindbergh, decades before Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, whose fame first gave rise to packs of news photographers. They followed the Lindberghs everywhere. When the Lindberghs' infant son Charles Jr. was kidnapped in1932 , the press paid frenzied attention to the crime; the story remained in the headlines for months.
Among the many heartbreaking artifacts that remain from the kidnapping is a front-page item in The New York Times from March 3, 1932: It's a brief notice, stating that the baby had been ill: "In the hope that whoever has taken the baby may see and understand the necessity for care, Mrs. Lindbergh...gave out the diet she had been following." It included -- underscoring a young mother's anguish in the most painful conceivable way -- "half a cup of orange juice on waking."
* * *
Anne became both an aviator and a writer, and her book, Gift From the Sea, has sold some 3 million copies since it was first published in 1955.
Katie talks with Anne's youngest child, Reeve Lindbergh, also a writer. In her 2018 memoir, Two Lives, Reeve reflected on her own “Two Lives,” navigating her role as the public face of her family while, at the same time, leading a quiet existence in rural Vermont.
Charles Lindbergh was a complicated man. Historians have documented his respect for the Nazis in prewar Germany. And in 2003, it was revealed that he had led a double life, having had a years-long affair with a woman in Germany with whom he had three children.
But that isn't what Katie wanted to talk to Reeve Lindbergh about. In the blog post that accompanies this episode, Katie writes about her reasons for not asking Reeve about her father's other families. It can be found on the podcast's website. Here's the blog post.
Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud.
In 1929, Anne Spencer Morrow, a 23-year-old introverted intellectual, married a man who was, at the time, arguably the most celebrated person in the world. He was Charles Lindbergh, and his incredible solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 had catapulted him to a wild level of fame.
It was Charles Lindbergh, decades before Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, whose fame first gave rise to packs of news photographers. They followed the Lindberghs everywhere. When the Lindberghs' infant son Charles Jr. was kidnapped in1932 , the press paid frenzied attention to the crime; the story remained in the headlines for months.
Among the many heartbreaking artifacts that remain from the kidnapping is a front-page item in The New York Times from March 3, 1932: It's a brief notice, stating that the baby had been ill: "In the hope that whoever has taken the baby may see and understand the necessity for care, Mrs. Lindbergh...gave out the diet she had been following." It included -- underscoring a young mother's anguish in the most painful conceivable way -- "half a cup of orange juice on waking."
* * *
Anne became both an aviator and a writer, and her book, Gift From the Sea, has sold some 3 million copies since it was first published in 1955.
Katie talks with Anne's youngest child, Reeve Lindbergh, also a writer. In her 2018 memoir, Two Lives, Reeve reflected on her own “Two Lives,” navigating her role as the public face of her family while, at the same time, leading a quiet existence in rural Vermont.
Charles Lindbergh was a complicated man. Historians have documented his respect for the Nazis in prewar Germany. And in 2003, it was revealed that he had led a double life, having had a years-long affair with a woman in Germany with whom he had three children.
But that isn't what Katie wanted to talk to Reeve Lindbergh about. In the blog post that accompanies this episode, Katie writes about her reasons for not asking Reeve about her father's other families. It can be found on the podcast's website. Here's the blog post.
Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud.
My mother was a woman of tremendous integrity. My mother was curious, protective, unflappable, loyal, complicated, powerful, honest, lyrical, she is devoted, resilient, dazzling, giving, extraordinary!
Reeve Lindbergh:She just jumped into this world of the air. My grandmother, when my mother told her that she was going to marry Charles Lindbergh, she sighed and she said "Well, Anne, you'll have the sky."
Katie Hafner:This is Our Mothers Ourselves, and I'm your host, Katie Hafner. In 1929, Anne Spencer Morrow, a 23 year old, introverted intellectual, married arguably the most famous man in the world. He was Charles Lindbergh, and his solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 had catapulted him to a wild level of fame. They were married for 55 years until his death in 1974. Anne became a writer, and her 1955 book Gift from the Sea sold 3 million copies. Her youngest child Reeve Lindbergh, also a writer, joined me to talk about her extraordinary mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who died in 2001. Reeve Lindbergh, thank you so much for coming on to Our Mothers Ourselves to talk to me about, about your mom.
Reeve Lindbergh:Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Katie Hafner:Let's start. I'd like to ask you, if you had one word to describe your mother, what would that word be?
Reeve Lindbergh:She was extremely thoughtful in every sense of the word.
Katie Hafner:Thoughtful. I like that. Thoughtful meaning in an intellectual sense, but also thoughtful toward others.
Reeve Lindbergh:Just on every level. Thoughtful on every level.
Katie Hafner:Let's keep that in mind as we go through the interview. And I'd like to start at the beginning of not just her life, but her parents' lives her, own mother's life. And, you know, as I, as I do these interviews, I think about what the theme might be. And as I was preparing for this one with you, in your mom's case, it's sort of like completing circles. So you have Smith College all over your family. And her mother, Betty, went to Smith in the 1890s, when I was reading that 2.8% of women even went to college in the 1890s.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes. She was a real, very fierce advocate for women's education. And her husband, thank goodness, not only supported her, but he himself was very devoted to education in a number of ways. He went to Amherst. And it was so, so prevalent throughout the family that my mother quoted a friend of the family who said, they were a fine family, but nuts on education.
Katie Hafner:So there's your grandfather, Dwight, your grandmother, Betty, they had three daughters, right?
Reeve Lindbergh:That's right.
Katie Hafner:So, but there, here comes your mother. So she was the second daughter of the three daughters. Your mom, as I understand, I was reading a little bit in that biography by Susan Hertog.
Reeve Lindbergh:Mhm.
Katie Hafner:About your mom being very shy, sort of the one who took a backseat to her older sister.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes.
Katie Hafner:And she, your mom was a true intellectual at Smith.
Reeve Lindbergh:She was very well educated, yes. And Smith was, was considered bluestocking, or a very intellectual place for women.
Katie Hafner:And it sounds like she had a really rich inner life.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes.
Katie Hafner:From early childhood.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes.
Katie Hafner:I love the story of, and here's where my whole little theory of completing the circle. So her mom, Betty, loved to write, ends up marrying your grandfather, and they start this whirlwind life together. And then he becomes a diplomat. He then goes to become an ambassador to Mexico.
Reeve Lindbergh:That's correct.
Katie Hafner:Right?
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes, he was appointed by Calvin Coolidge.
Katie Hafner:And this is where things get really fun. Because then the story of your mom going to Mexico for Christmas, and then meeting this tall, handsome guy, will you tell that story?
Reeve Lindbergh:She met my father in Christmas of 1927, which would be six months or so after his famous flight to Paris, which she knew very little about. She had been studying, she said, in the basement of the Smith College Libraries and writing a paper on Emerson. And she kind of came up into the light and in May and was hearing all about this aviator, this famous aviator. And didn't really connect with it at all. She thought that the nickname Lindy was silly. And she thought when she went to, when she and her sisters and her brother went to Mexico for Christmas, she, she thought,"Well, I'm not going to be interested in this Lindy," who arrived in Mexico City at the invitation of her father, Ambassador Morrow. And the President of Mexico. It was a kind of goodwill gesture from the United States to Mexico, to help with relations between the two countries. And he came!
Katie Hafner:And to much fanfare as I understand it. I mean, this was like the beginning of the whole phenomenon of paparazzi.
Reeve Lindbergh:That's what- I think people really feel that the kind of the enormous attention that my father got, once he landed in Paris, was the beginning of that whole enormous paparazzi tradition. Of even of what they call the yellow press, to some extent. That celebrities were suddenly surrounded, attacked almost, by the press. And I've had people who have apologized to me for what my father and my mother eventually went through, as, as a result of that attention.
Katie Hafner:Yeah, I think it's easy for us to forget, first of all that what it is that your parents went through, but we'll get to that.
Reeve Lindbergh:Mhm.
Katie Hafner:But for now, let's, let's, let's stick with this fairy tale romantic meeting in Mexico. When I guess Elizabeth was the one that your grandmother put forward to Colonel Lindbergh. Okay, let's hear that story.
Reeve Lindbergh:I'm not sure, it may be true. But I think also that my mother felt that for sure this young man would fall for Elizabeth because everybody did. And yet when he, when my father, who was clearly interested in my mother all the time, when she eventually let her parents know that she was thinking of, she had been proposed to by Charles Lindbergh, her parents were quite taken aback. It wasn't enormous excitement and euphoria. Her father said, "What do we know about this young man anyway?"
Katie Hafner:Yeah, because he was not, he was- I don't want to use the word hayseed. But he-
Reeve Lindbergh:I just did.
Katie Hafner:Yeah.
Reeve Lindbergh:You can, you go right ahead! I'm sure that's what they thought!
Katie Hafner:Yeah, I get the feeling that that's what they thought. Is "What is this hayseed doing proposing to our daughter?" Even though he was world-famous.
Reeve Lindbergh:I think they were, yeah, I would suspect that, for one thing, my father was a terrible student. And then when he went to the University of Madison, Wisconsin for engineering and a couple other things that he did quite well. And they had to expel him after two years, because he basically, he was not an attentive student. And of course, after the flight, that same university gave him an honorary degree when he flew in after the flight.
Katie Hafner:Let me interrupt you for a second to say that not every- When you say "the flight," there's, you know, a couple generations ago, everyone would have known what that was. But let's just do a re-
Reeve Lindbergh:Okay.
Katie Hafner:A recap of "the flight."
Reeve Lindbergh:"The flight" was, was, in 1927, my father made a nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. And nobody had done exactly that before. And there was a prize established for the first person who could do that. Many people tried and died. It was a very, very tough thing to do at that time to fly over the North Atlantic, because it took about 33, 34 hours. And, and it was very dangerous. He started in New York, in the rain, and, ah, and he kept flying over the North Atlantic. Tried hard to stay awake, that was hard, too. And he landed in Paris. He started 19th, I think he landed on the 21st of May in 1927. And there were thousands of people, probably the most famous person on the planet in that instant. Hard to get used to.
Katie Hafner:Yeah, and I have to tell you. My own father, he became a pilot. In fact, he died in a crash in a plane. He was flying. His birthday, on his seventh birthday, which was May 21 1927.
Reeve Lindbergh:Oh, for heaven's sake.
Katie Hafner:Yes. And his story he'd tell, he told, was that there was all this, in New York City, there was all this celebration and he heard fireworks and he said to his parents, "Oh, they all know it's my birthday!"
Reeve Lindbergh:Well, my father would love that story. That's just-
Katie Hafner:Ohhh.
Reeve Lindbergh:I'm so glad it made him so happy.
Katie Hafner:And that's what inspired him to become- I mean, he was a, he was a scientist. He was a physicist. But he had a passion for flying. And I think he got that passion. It is a lovely story. And he got that passion from your dad.
Reeve Lindbergh:Oh, I believe it. Love, lovely.
Katie Hafner:So there we go. So now we've established for our listeners just how famous your father was. Your mother, you said, wasn't even really all that aware that this had happened, which is amazing. They get married, she became his copilot. She learned to fly, and did she, did she have her very first flying experience with him?
Reeve Lindbergh:She did. She flew with him in Mexico. The whole family did.
Katie Hafner:And did she just love it?
Reeve Lindbergh:She did. She did love it.
Katie Hafner:So then she learned to fly herself.
Reeve Lindbergh:She did. And he taught her to fly. And then she, she flew gliders. She was, she was the first woman in this country to obtain a glider pilot's license. And she actually liked that better than motorized flying. Always loved that best, and remembered it, and wrote about it. Which is something many people don't know about her.
Katie Hafner:Yeah. When I saw that, about her being the first woman to get a glider pilot's license, I guess in 1930.
Reeve Lindbergh:Mhm. I think it was '30 or '31. Yeah.
Katie Hafner:Of course she would like that more than motorized flying. My guess is because of the silence.
Reeve Lindbergh:That, you are so right. She loved the silence. Because you could not only see what was below you, but you could hear. You could hear birds, you could hear the wind in the trees. And it was a completely silent and absolutely beautiful experience.
Katie Hafner:Ohh. So now we have, we have your mom, this woman with a rich inner life. She's married this huge celebrity, but she was private. How did she handle all that attention? Was that hard for her?
Reeve Lindbergh:I think it was hard for her. But in a way, she had the training for some of this as a diplomats daughter. I don't think she had anything like the training for the paparazzi aspect of it.
Katie Hafner:She's all of five feet tall.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yeah.
Katie Hafner:Size five shoe.
Reeve Lindbergh:That's correct. Size five.
Katie Hafner:I mean, do not-
Reeve Lindbergh:That's it!
Katie Hafner:Confuse stature, physical stature, with, with strength, right?
Reeve Lindbergh:She had such strength and stamina, and a kind of character that was just solid to the core. She thought of herself as a shy, timid, ineffective even, young woman. And she wasn't! She was a remarkably competent and tough individual. She just jumped into this world of the air. My grandmother, when my mother told her that she was going to marry Charles Lindbergh, she sighed, and she said, "Well, Anne, you'll have the sky." Which was a great thing for her to say, because that's, I'm sure what my mother felt. That he had given her the sky. Well, he gave her a whole different world, a huge, and the openness of sky, and the adventure of sky, just some kind of wonderfully liberating element that she had stepped into with my father.
Katie Hafner:So they got married in 1929.
Reeve Lindbergh:Mhm.
Katie Hafner:And they had their first child, Charles, Jr.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes, yeah. Tha's right.
Katie Hafner:Walk us, walk us through that story.
Reeve Lindbergh:Well, they had, I think, I think there was a lovely period of his first year or so. He was a, you know, blonde, blue eyed, very smiley and affectionate child. And they were terribly happy. My mother, she wrote a book called Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. And the hour of gold was that happy trio. Her, she and her husband, and this little boy. And the hour of lead began when her baby, their baby was taken from his room at their home in Hopewell, New Jersey. And he was kidnapped for money. There was a ransom note. But in fact, from what my mother understood over the years, he had died immediately. He had fallen from the, from the ladder they used. And he was dead. From within minutes of his being taken. They didn't know that. They went through a long period of trying to get somebody to negotiate with the kidnappers, and they- Somebody involved was arrested, Bruno Hauptmann. I don't think people are sure that he was the only person involved. But he was arrested. And he was ultimately executed for the crime. There was a kidnapping law passed in reference to that crime. That was absolutely devastating.
Katie Hafner:As I been thinking about it, of course, I, like many, have heard about it through the years. And it was this, again, this huge public frenzy around the kidnapping at the time. And it's been likened to the OJ Simpson-
Reeve Lindbergh:Yeah.
Katie Hafner:To the, to that case in the 90's. And so there, what happens when something becomes so public is that we tend to forget the private devastation.
Reeve Lindbergh:Indeed, we do. I do. I noticed, and was told about people who deeply identified with this. And men of the era have, years ago now, have come to me and said, "Well I was, I was taken for the Lindbergh baby. The police stopped my parents' car, and they thought I was the Lindbergh baby, because I was the right age." And this happened to men all over the country. This happened to people, or they had terrible nightmares about being taken from their family and spirited away.
Katie Hafner:Yeah, in its time, it was one of the most horrific things.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes. I never met my brother. I'm very sad about that. But then they went on to have, to have my older brother, John, and my brothers, Landon, Scott, and my sister Anne, and me. They had a big family after the death of that child. But I don't- I know, in fact, that my mother never forgot. And I lost a child that same age, just through illness. A little boy. And she was of the greatest help to me, because she had gone through that. We shared somethinhg. That was very helpful to me and perhaps helpful to her. I don't know.
Katie Hafner:What an eerie coincidence though.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yeah.
Katie Hafner:I'm so sorry that happened.
Reeve Lindbergh:You don't forget. But you do grow around it, which is something she said to me. She said that on that day, she said, "The horrors, the horror subsides. The memory remains. The love remains." I never forgot. That was, as I said, tremendously helpful. Because of what she had been through, and the way she had endured it, her very thoughtful and precise gift to me, of how she had survived it.
Katie Hafner:So she had a lot of wisdom to give you during that time and probably throughout your life. She was the mother of five children after her first child died. What kind of mother was she?
Reeve Lindbergh:Oh she was a lovely, adorable mother. She was adorable. She was an adorable mother. And I compared notes with my brother. And we realized that each one of us thought we were her favorite child.
Katie Hafner:Oh, that, okay now that's-
Reeve Lindbergh:That's a good mother!
Katie Hafner:How did she pull that off?
Reeve Lindbergh:I don't- Well, she was a wonderful listener. And she never ever gave you a sense that, that there was anything wrong with you. You could not, you couldn't sustain an idea that there was anything wrong with you ever in the presence of my mother. Who loved her children I think probably equally. But she, she was asked once. Well, I can't remember who asked her, not me, who was her favorite child. And she would think, and she'd say, "The one who needs me most of the time."
Katie Hafner:Hmm. Good answer.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yeah, that was a great answer.
Katie Hafner:What year were you born?
Reeve Lindbergh:I was born in 1945. And the very end of the war, the Second World War, and grew up in the 40's and 50's.
Katie Hafner:I'd like to talk about this kind of touchy subject of your father's reputation during the rise of the Nazi era.
Reeve Lindbergh:He made speeches with the America's First committee and that-
Katie Hafner:An isolationist group, right?
Reeve Lindbergh:That was an isolationist movement of people who did not want the US to enter the Second World War. And of course, this was before Pearl Harbor, and before the inevitability of war was quite so obvious. And he, he said in the speech that was the most reviled. He said there are three
groups pushing for war:the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews. And then he went on to say why each group wanted, believed we should enter the war. My mother told him, "If you give that speech, you will be labeled antisemitic." And he said, "But I'm not antisemitic." And he went on and made the speech. And she was right. I don't think he ever understood, the way many people don't understand, racism. Today, many people will say,"Well, I'm not racist," and "We didn't, our family wasn't involved in slavery," and this, that and the other. But there is an atmosphere of racism or antisemitism, and a structure that is, is evident and kind of reflected by certain ways of speech. They didn't understand.
Katie Hafner:And how do you think your mother, she must have been frustrated that he didn't listen to her.
Reeve Lindbergh:For her, the hardest part was that she felt there are people who will never see who he really is. Above all, her sense, "No, no, that's not who he really is." No matter what he said, "That's not who h really is." And I think that hu t the mos
Katie Hafner:Let's go back to your, to your mother's internal life. And you were, let's see, so she then was this wonderfully present mother for all of you. And then if you were born in 1945. So you were ten years old, around ten I guess, when she went off to write Gift from the Sea. Do you remember all of that vividly?
Reeve Lindbergh:I don't remember it too vividly. And it was that- Oh, she actually wrote the book over several years, but there was probably, it would have been a period of weeks when she was away. And I'm sure I didn't like it one bit. But I don't remember that. I do remember the excitement of the publication. And how we used to watch the The New York Times bestseller list to see whether Gift from the Sea, which was on it, to see how it had either climbed or fallen in that list.
Katie Hafner:And something like five, it's sold five million copies over the years, right?
Reeve Lindbergh:Yeah, I'm thinking three million. But five million, could be.
Katie Hafner:Hey, what's a few million?
Reeve Lindbergh:What's a few million? Yeah.
Katie Hafner:So rather than talk about the book, let's actually hear the book. And I'd love to have you read a little, a little excerpt.
Reeve Lindbergh:I would love to do it. And thank you for suggesting this. Let's see. I'm reading from the chapter that's called channeled whelk, which is the name of a shell. Each chapter is called after one of the shells on the beach where
she stayed. This excerpt starts:To be a woman is to have interest and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass. Husband, children, friends, home, community. Stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web, to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes, with a new awareness both painful and humorous. I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I was supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children. The running of a house with its thousand details. The problem is not merely one of women-
Katie Hafner:I'm gonna rudely talk over Reeve for a minute here, just to say that it didn't occur to me until I was editing the interview and came to this part that this was written in 1955. And Anne Lindbergh was saying something pretty profound. About a mother seeking balance in life. I mean, this was way ahead of its time.
Reeve Lindbergh:-There is no easy answer. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes. A swing of the pendulum between solitude and communion. Between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life as a beginning.
Katie Hafner:When do you remember reading the book for the first time?
Reeve Lindbergh:I read the book when I was, I think I didn't read the book from beginning to end until I was in college. I knew it was there. And I knew what it meant to my mother. And it was separate from my life with her. I probably was jealous of the book! Just, I think, I and then when I went to, went to school myself, when I went into college life, I was much more interested. And I began to read. I read from cover to cover, and then I read it again. And I still read that book once a year. And I'm 75 years old. So for 50-some odd years, I have been reading Gift from the Sea at least once a year. And it always brings me- It brings me back my mother, yes. But it brings back the wisdom that she poured into that book, which means so much to so many women, even now.
Katie Hafner:So much.
Reeve Lindbergh:And you know, his books. I found, when my father was dying, I read my father's Spirit of St. Louis from cover to cover. And I read it again. I think it was very, and I found a couple of my brothers were doing the same thing.
Katie Hafner:Do you think we do that, do you think we go through our parents' journals and papers and books to get to know them better? Or in a different way, or from a different place?
Reeve Lindbergh:I absolutely think we do. And thank you for saying that. And I have this connection to my parents.
Katie Hafner:And it gets back to my theory, my possibly crackpot theory of, of completing the circle intergenerationally. Where your mother's mother had, it sounds like she had a rich inner life, as did your mother, as do you. And it manifested in writing. And-
Reeve Lindbergh:I like your crackpot theory! I don't think it's a crackpot theory.
Katie Hafner:It's definitely growing on me. And so they, so now it has managed to, there's a continuum through the generations of the writing and expression through writing, which is really rich. That all of you, women- I know the men have been writers too, but let's stick with the women- have been able to achieve in the richest way. And the book of yours that really strikes a chord with me is the one at the very end of your mother's life, No More Words.
Reeve Lindbergh:Yes, thank you.
Katie Hafner:That is so powerful. It's almost hard to read. It's, it's both heartbreaking and it's uplifting. And why don't you describe your mother's very late
Reeve Lindbergh:The book that you mentioned, No More Words, years? was not written as a book. That book came from my journals as I was here on the farm in Vermont when my mother came to live with us. The last two years of her life. She had had a series of strokes. It wasn't Alzheimer's, but it presented a bit like Alzheimer's. She would, she seemed to be not connecting with the world. And she was very, very quiet. She didn't talk much. But she was a woman of words. And I think that was the hardest thing for me was not to have her voice in my life. And she had caregivers who were there all the time. They were Buddhists. They would take her driving a lot because she often said that- which I know is very common- She would say, "I want to go home." And she wouldn't tell you where home was. I took her driving once, and she suddenly said to me, "I'm afraid." And I got very concerned. And I said, "What is it you're afraid of mother? Is it, you know, is it, is it feeling weaker? Or losing friends? Or, what is it?" And she looked at me right in the middle of the, was it Highway I-93 I think, and she said,"It's your driving!" So she could talk. And she could she could make her feelings known.
Katie Hafner:Sounds like she had a good sense of humor.
Reeve Lindbergh:I think she did. She'd come out of that little quiet, slightly drifty person that she seemed to be the last few years of her life, and she could just kind of nail you with a statement.
Katie Hafner:Were you with her when she died?
Reeve Lindbergh:I was, yeah. I was, um, I was right there with her. My brothers were there too, two of them were there. When she died. And it was very peaceful. It was very, very quiet. And there was a beautiful snowstorm happening the day she died. Just absolutely beautiful and very quiet.
Katie Hafner:What would you say her legacy is to the world, and to you?
Reeve Lindbergh:I think her legacy is to stay open. That's what I would say. It was to stay open to life as much as you can. And it was certainly what she did. So many things happened to her in her life. And she was able to, she didn't close up. I don't know how else to talk about it. She always was able to sit quietly, to be thoughtful, to listen, to absorb whatever had happened, or whatever a person was telling her. And she was probably the most open person I've ever known. And that, in itself, is a very rare gift.
Katie Hafner:Well, this has been so interesting. And thank you so much. I mean, you used the word thoughtful. I would, I guess I can think of at least, as you said, another dozen words to describe her.
Reeve Lindbergh:That's it. There are at least another dozen. That's the one I hold on to, I think. Oh, such openness for life. And that, in a sense, means she was- Oh, I can't say unafraid, I'm sure she would disagree with me. But that was a gift to all of us. Her openness, her thoughtfulness, her listening, and her reaching out through her words to all the rest of us.
Katie Hafner:Well, Reeve, thank you so much.
Reeve Lindbergh:Thank you, Katie. This has been a real kind of a nourishment for me to be able to talk about her with you this way. Thank you.
Katie Hafner:And that's it this week for Our Mothers Ourselves. Our theme music was composed and performed by Andrea Perry. Paula Mangin is our artist in residence. And Alice Hudson is the show's producer. Please visit us at ourmothersourselves.com and contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the site's mother word cloud. That's ourmothersourselves.com. Our Mothers Ourselves is a production of Odradek Studios in San Francisco, and I'm your host Katie Hafner. Here's to a great 2021. [[Transcript proofread by Benjy Wachter.]]