No More Words A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh [Paperback]

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 Wordsis 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.Chapter One: September 1999

I learned to know the world through words, but they were not my own. From the beginning of my life, as I remember it, everything I understood was made plain to me in her language, which I knew much better than my own. Her quiet voice, her exquisite gentle articulation, her loving eloquence, all of these things spoke me through my days, comforted my nights, and gave each hour of every twenty-four its substance, shape, and meaning from the time that I was born.

She knew me well, and at each moment of my need, she spoke the words I needed. Sometimes the words were abstract, the language vague, but the message was always uncannily the right one for that instant. When I was a child -- the youngest of her five offspring -- and injured or unhappy, she would say, Everybody loves you, Reeve! and that was enough to draw the healing circle of affection around me and mend my trouble, whether itl#»