When I read Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age – and Other Unexpected Adventures (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $24) I felt like I was spending an afternoon with a very special friend. The humor, candor and tenderness Reeve Lindbergh shares with the reader is touching and leaves you wishing you could spend more time with this renowed memorist.
Lindbergh reflects on what it means be 60 – the age her mother wisely called "the youth of old age" – and how that chronological milestone has shaped her life and perceptions as a wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, writer and woman. Lindbergh who is famous as achildren’s book author is the youngest child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She navigates the unavoidable signposts and obstacles of growing older in this forthright collection of engagingly linked essays.
"Conversations with friends who are about my age are different now from the discussions we used to have 30 or 40 years ago," Lindbergh writes. "In our 20s and 30s we talked about natural childbirth and breast-feeding, toilet training and preschools, teachers and extracurricular activities (the ski program; the ballet class; who is driving this week’s car pool). In our 60s and 70s we sometimes find ourselves talking about long-term care insurance, environmentally sound retirement communities, living wills, end-of-life care, and ashes."
Yet despite the tectonic shift of age and the accompanying minor indignities, Lindbergh still cherishes the fundamental pleasures found in the daily adventure of living. She writes with wry appreciation about the vast and varied pharmaceutical choices of our time, and a bit ruefully about gravity’s unforgiving pull on the face in the mirror. She revels in the natural world that she encounters near her rural Vermont home, finding solace in the constant cycles of life. And she copes with varying degrees of success with her youngest child’s graduation and departure, with illness, with the deaths of loved ones, and with the demands and betrayals of time.
Some of the essays are ruminations on life’s pleasures – reading, writing, owning a dog – while others search for consolation when faced with more troubling aspects of life, as in the diary of her battle against a brain tumor. Ever conscious of the legacy of her famous parents – about whom she has already written so eloquently in Under a Wing and No More Words – Lindbergh returns time and again to memories of both. In a Gift from Captiva, she revisits the Florida island that inspired Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic Gift from the Sea, finding it much changed, yet still possessed of special treasures. Of a photograph of her mother that she keeps with her at all times, Lindbergh writes, "it reminds me of the many ways in which my mother lights my way through the world, even now."
Lindbergh’s more problematic relationship with her father is explored in the final essay in the book, in which she talks for the first time about her reaction to the revelation – made public in 2003 – that Charles Lindbergh had three secret families and seven additional children, in Europe. Having struggled with how this famously rigid arbiter of ethics and morality, both at home and on a grand public scale, could have deceived and hurt so many people by his actions, Lindbergh has reached a graceful state of acceptance. "I remember my father as a deeply intelligent and incredibly energetic man, a man of warmth and humor and charm and a kind of old-fashioned shy courtesy," she writes. "I also remember my father as the most infuriatingly impossible human being I have ever known: an angry, restless, opinionated perfectionist, never able to be still for any length of time….All these decades after his death, when I learned that there were three women in my father’s life besides my mother, one of my first thoughts was that this arrangement made a certain kind of sense. No one woman possibly could have lived with him all the time."
As the narrative formed by the inter-linked essays gently unfolds, Lindbergh strives to "tiptoe away from the closed rooms of the past…and move quietly into the present." Flush with a deep appreciation for the ordinary gifts life can offer, Reeve Lindbergh beautifully conveys both the disillusions and delights that come with living into the later third of your life.
Available at local bookstores or online at amazon.com and simonsays.com.
Claire Yezbak Fadden is the Associate Editor of LifeAfter50.com.
