Remembering Madeleine L'Engle

I learned today that Madeleine L'Engle has died, and suddenly my world is a darker place.

I have loved Madeleine L'Engle since third grade, when I first read A Wrinkle in Time. I've read it many, many times since then, and it has never failed to touch me with its message of hope and redemption. I strongly identified with Meg Murry, a social misfit who travels across space and time to rescue her imprisoned father and discover her own unique worth. (Perhaps the story resonated more personally with me because one of my best friends was another Meg with glasses, braces, impossible hair, and an attic bedroom.) I still remember thrilling to Meg's declaration "Like and equal are two entirely different things!" and her revelation that she had something the supremely evil IT lacked: the ability to love.

As I look back, it seems to me that I rediscovered L'Engle at every stage of my growing up. I read A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door in elementary school; Meet the Austins and The Moon by Night in middle school; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Arm of the Starfish, and A Ring of Endless Light in high school; and An Acceptable Time and Troubling a Star after college. Along the way, L'Engle taught me about Einsteinian physics, empathy, genetics, Shakespeare, grace, marine biology, Robert Frost, interdependence, the value of poetry, and the restorative properties of cinnamon toast.

L'Engle also taught me that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a Christian, to combine a faithful heart with an active mind, a lesson I value all the more because I hear it so infrequently in this increasingly polarized society.

My husband struggles to comfort me as I mourn my hero's passing. He wants to be sympathetic, but he's clearly bewildered by my grieving for a woman I didn't even know. True, I never met Madeleine L'Engle, but I did know her, or at least she knew me. She was my friend and teacher all of my life, and I would not be the person I am without her loving and thoughtful influence.

"She was eighty-eight years old," my husband reminds me. "That's a long life by any standard." He's right, of course, but this is not the way the heart reasons. How can Madeleine L'Engle be old? How can Madeleine L'Engle die? This simply isn't possible.

The authors we read as children become our parents, ideal mothers and fathers frozen in time. It never occurs to us that these beloved perfect parents might be only human after all.