Introduction

In 1999 Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the famed aviator and author, moved from her home in Connecticut to the farm in Vermont where her daughter, Reeve, and Reeve's family live. Mrs. Lindbergh was in her nineties and had been rendered nearly speechless years earlier by a series of small strokes that also left her frail and dependent on others for her care. As an accomplished author who had learned to write in part by reading her mother's many books, Reeve was deeply saddened and frustrated by her inability to communicate with her mother, a woman long recognized in her family and throughout the world as a gifted communicator.
No More Words is a moving and compassionate memoir of the final seventeen months of Reeve's mother's life. Reeve writes with great sensitivity and sympathy for her mother's plight, while also analyzing her own conflicting feelings. Anyone who has had to care for an elderly parent disabled by Alzheimer's or stroke will understand immediately the heartache and anguish Reeve suffered and will find comfort in her story.

Editorial Review

Her daughter's tender account of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's final 22 months is a fitting epitaph for an author who revealed her inner life with an honesty and sensitivity that have inspired generations of readers since Gift from the Sea was first published in 1955. This new volume also makes a fine companion for Under a Wing, Reeve Lindbergh's previous memoir about her parents' complex marriage and her own struggle to grapple with the legacy of her famous father, Charles Lindbergh. Yet it's not necessary to know anything about Anne's writing or Charles's exploits as an aviator to be moved by No More Words, which chronicles a day-to-day drama of worry, guilt, anger, and unexpected joy that will be familiar to anyone who has cared for an elderly, ailing parent. Drawing on a diary she kept from the time her mother came to live with her in May 1999 until Anne's death at age 94 in February 2001, Reeve Lindbergh deals first and foremost with her shock that her literate, articulate mother no longer had much use for words. "From the beginning of my life," she writes, "everything I understood was made plain to me in her language.... at each moment of my need she spoke the words I needed." But after a series of strokes, Anne spoke less and less, and not everything she said made sense. Reeve had to find meaning for herself; she had to accept her mother's increasing remoteness and take pleasure from the moments when Anne seemed to come back to her. She traces that process in spare, eloquent prose complemented by excerpts from her mother's works: "It was very important to me that her writing voice, too, should be heard," Reeve states. "The truth about this book is that it is not mine but ours." --Wendy Smith

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