Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog

the beneficence of “progress.” Technology was only as good as its masters; Science had to be governed by values. He turned back to nature in the hope of recapturing the lessons of his boyhood in the wilderness of Minnesota. His thoughts would echo his father’s Jeffersonian principles, and confirm the relationship between agrarian society and moral virtue. Nonetheless, Charles Lindbergh would never rescind his wartime views.
    By mid-July 1974, there was nothing more his doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital could do. Defying their warning that he would not last the trip, Charles decided to return to Maui. Maui had come to feel like “home”—tinctured by memories of his boyhood on the Mississippi, and his childhood fantasies of solitary adventure in tropical jungles and warm island seas. 24
    Juan Trippe at Pan Am flatly refused to help him, but Sam Pryor was able to secure him a place on a United Airlines commercial flight. Carried into the cabin on a stretcher, Charles was cordoned off by curtains from tourists and staff. Anne, Land, and Jon sat by his side. His physician in Maui, Dr. Milton Howell, fearing that the Lindbergh home was too far from the medical clinic, borrowed a cottage on the sea three miles outside the town of Hana. For eight days, attended by two nurses around the clock, Charles lay in his seaside bed, taking charge of the preparations for his burial in the yard of an abandoned church he and Sam had restored several years earlier. He chose a eucalyptus coffin, sufficiently wide to accommodate his “broad shoulders,” and instructed his native-born friend Tevy Kahalevah to see that the grave would be large enough to accommodate Anne, eventually. He sketched in detail the drainage pipe system and the rock configuration necessary to maintain the integrity of the grave’s walls, and ordered for the gravestone a block of Vermont granite large enough not to tempt souvenir hunters. He chose lines from Psalm 139, his favorite, to be engraved exactly a quarter-inch into the surface of the stone, deepenough so that wind and rain could not wash the words away. They read: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …”
    But as if he could not bear his own vulnerability, Charles stopped short of the next verses:
    Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day: and the darkness and the light are both alike to thee
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    Tired and weak, but alert and talkative, Charles juggled the apparatus to the end. He wanted to believe his inability to breathe was a matter of technical adjustment. Surrendering to a sedative and a painkiller, Charles slipped into a coma on Sunday evening, August 25. He died the following morning at seven-fifteen. Barefoot, clad in khakis, and wrapped in his favorite New England blanket, Charles was lifted into his eucalyptus coffin and set in the back of Tevy’s pickup truck for the seven-mile journey along the winding seacliff road to the Congregational church in Kipahulu. The church was decorated with boughs of bougainvillea, stalks of ginger, and hibiscus and plumeria blossoms. One of his nurses, barefoot and silent, carried flowers in her apron to the coffin and scattered them, one by one, across its surface. His friend Henry Kaluhu led the singing of “Angel’s Welcome” as Tevy lowered the casket into the grave alongside Sam Pryor’s buried pet gibbons. Interred one hour earlier than stated on the public schedule, Charles, one last time, outwitted the press.
    Anne was grateful to Charles’s physician, Dr. Milton Howell. Because of him, Charles had been able to choose the rhythm and pace of his death. He wanted to confront it on his own terms, to maneuver its currents as he went, and to plan its details in the embrace of his family and the beauty of Maui he