An Alcott Advent: Joy
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 1: 2-4
Blessed be the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, a gentle Father, the Mother of mercies and the God of all consolation, who comforts us in all our sorrows and affliction, so that we can offer others, in their sorrows and affliction, the consolation that we have received from God ourselves.
Christians critique Alcott’s book and even seek to ban it from Sunday School Libraries. Among their key sticking points is Beth’s death. Beth’s death, possibly one of the most moving and beautiful narratives of life and death and love and grief that people of any age, particularly young people, can read, isn’t Christian enough.
“More than any one in the world, Beth. I used to think I couldn’t let you go, but I’m learning to feel that I don’t lose you, that you’ll be more to me than ever, and death can’t part us, though it seems to.”
“I know it cannot, and I don’t fear it any longer, for I’m sure I shall be your Beth still, to love and help you more than ever. You must take my place, Jo, and be everything to Father and Mother when I'm gone. They will turn to you, don’t fail them, and if it’s hard to work alone, remember that I don’t forget you, and that you’ll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing all the world, for love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.”
“I’ll try, Beth.” (Chapter 40)
I think what the book banners mean by not Chrisitan enough is the lack of easy, quick platitudes that are woven through what is most easily accessed Christian Spirituality. Beth’s death didn’t have prayers of salvation and fears of eternal damnation, healing and sickness wasn’t tied to God’s plan. In fact, Alcott used nature metaphors to speak of death. Phrases like God has a plan or God needed another angel, spring to our lips so easily when we meet the deep and abiding grief in another’s loss. Life is often so full of mystery to us that death is almost incomprehensible. We love easy absolutes so much and so we paint a picture of what we don’t know with what we do. We imagine pearly gates and streets paved with gold, like heaven is Oz.
And all of this might work just fine, until we ourselves face this kind of grief and loss. Until the heaviness of the world or the brokenness of relationships or the profound darkness of our dreams deferred meets us face to face. When this happens we have a chance to shrink back into easy or numb or we have a chance to grow. Alcott doesn't write about death the way her contemporaries did and it is perhaps because she knew what death really looked like. And like any good writer, she writes what she knows.
At 30, the fearless, healthy and independent Luisa applied to be a nurse in the Civil War. She had at this point already nursed her mother in ailing moments and her sister Lizzy. Ten years before Little Women (in 1858), her 23 year old sister Lizzy died of Scarlet fever contracted in the care of struggling neighbors. Just as the family was getting back on its feet and their father was remodeling and repairing the family's iconic home Orchard House. Lizzy dies, a painful death in the care of her family. When they move into Orchard House they will place her piano in the dining room, so she is with them in every meal, conversation, theatrical and even within view of their oldest sister Anna/Nan’s Wedding that same year. Louisa will write;
“The past year has brought us the first death and betrothal—two events that change my life. I can see that these experiences have taken a deep hold, and changed or developed me… I feel as if I could write better now—more truly of things felt and therefore known. I shall yet do my great book, for that seems to be my work, and I am growing up to it.”
—Journal, November 1858
In 1862, as the Civil War raged, Alcott reached the age of thirty. She was now officially a spinster, which meant she could apply to be a nurse. Her paperwork was already complete, and she sent it in on her birthday. She arrived in Washington DC at a Union hospital under the direction of Dorothea Dix. Men arrived bloody, muddy, and groaning from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Her first job was to wash the mud and blood of the battlefield from every part of their bodies. The woman who had not seen a naked man was assigned to wash all of the men. She will write in her journal about having to adjust her sensitivities and get to work.
After a quick adjustment, she became adept at this work, caring for the men, sitting with them as they died, taking them outside for fresh air and sunlight as her family would have done, writing letters for them, reading to them, knowing when there was nothing more to be done, and simply being present with them and with the other people who had signed up to work at the very brink of hell. She wrote in her journal and in her letters home the stories and moments of joy and humor, as well as pain and loss.
Alcott’s nursing work ended when she, like so many others, contracted typhoid. The once energetic and unstoppable Louisa, who had run every morning or even walked to Boston from Concord whenever she felt like it, was now a shadow of herself. The hospital’s medicines made her condition worse, and she struggled with the effects of mercury poisoning. When she was well enough to travel, her father came to collect her and take her home to Orchard House.
Her healing was arduous and painful, exhausting in every way. As Edward Emerson noted, “she was a white, tragic mask of what she had once been” (Cheever, p159). She suffered from delusions and nightmares, moments when she could not recognize her mother, the ‘blood and thunder stories’ she once wrote for quick money came to life in her mind and the Concord luminaries gathered around her to help; astonished, as though a different woman returned from the war. As she convalesced and slowly regained some energy, she shaped her letters and journals into her first published work, Hospital Sketches, in 1863. Through her healing, her grief, and her confrontation with the face of hell, she came to know herself more deeply and found her voice.
She wrote Beth’s illness into the first half of Little Women, published in 1869, and Beth’s death into the second half a year later. She wrote what she knew. Her understanding of death and loss, even before the war and her sister’s death, was shaped by the teachers, preachers, family, and friends who surrounded her.
Her first real encounter with death came when Emerson’s five year old son Waldo contracted scarlet fever and died. Robert D. Richardson narrated this story best, saying,
“The grief in the Emerson house was all consuming. When nine year old Louisa May Alcott came to the door to inquire after Waldo, she was met by his thirty eight year old father. Emerson was so stricken he could not bring himself to speak the name either of his boy or the girl at the door. ‘Child, he is dead,’ was all he could manage. Alcott later said this was her first experience of a great grief…Emerson wrote at least ten letters immediately. “I comprehend nothing of the fact of Waldo’s death but its bitterness. Explanation, I have none. Consolation, none that arises out of the fact itself, only diversion, only oblivion of this, and pursuit of new objects” (Robert D. Richardson, Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of their Lives, p 34).
The grief in Concord was widely felt. Weeks before Waldo’s death, Thoreau was plunged into deep sorrow when his brother John nicked his finger while shaving and contracted tetanus. Henry nursed John, called the Concord doctor, and later summoned a doctor from Boston. Nothing could be done. Emerson, Thoreau, and all of Concord faced this grief together. Ten years before, a young 28 year-old Reverend Emerson, then in the employ of the Second Church of Boston, lost his wife Ellen to Tuberculosis. Five days later he recorded a journal prayer longing to be reunited with her, calling those five days wasted without her.
“There is that which passes away and never returns. This miserable apathy, I know, may wear off. I almost fear when it will. Old duties will present themselves with no more repulsive face. I shall go again among my friends with a tranquil countenance. Again I shall be amused. I shall stoop again to little hopes and little fears and forget the graveyard” (Richardson, p 2).
For the young Emerson, his faith proved insufficient in the face of his grief. He struggled deeply, even visiting Ellen’s grave and opening her coffin to confront her death and the decay of her body. He resigned from his work as a minister. He discovered her unfinished poetry and wrote back to her. He was lost. He boarded a ship to Europe, despite the captain’s fears that he was too sick to survive the journey. He landed in Malta, worked his way across the continent, and arrived in London a changed man. His grief reshaped everything. Nature became his field of study, and lecturing became his vocation. Nature grounded him, and he explored it with reverence. It would ground Thoreau as well. Together these men centered nature and relationships as they grieved. Together they examined nature’s cycles and seasons of growth and decay.
For Thoreau, “What had been a more or less conventional romantic approach to nature quickly became, after John’s death, a profoundly felt emotional acceptance, not just an intellectual assent, of death as an inescapable part of living, and an acceptance that at some level, there is no death” (Richardson, p 63).
These men were Louisa May Alcott’s teachers and the family the Alcotts made, not of blood but of connection. Nature was their classroom, and purpose was central to being awake in the world. Perhaps this is why. Beth explains, “It’s like the tide, Jo. When it turns, it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped” (Chapter 36). Beth’s death was not a conventional Christian moral tale, perhaps because Alcott never learned any easy absolutes. She understood life and death, grief and pain and joy deeply. She lived it. She learned it as part of life from her teachers. She witnessed it in her nursing. Her spirituality and her faith did not require pearly gates or golden streets or angelic job descriptions for Waldo or John or Lizzy or the men she nursed.
And frankly, Jesus did not offer these platitudes either. When he prepared the people he loved for his death, he broke bread, lifted the cup, and said, remember me. He asked them to continue the work of caring for others. That was the way he lived with them and on in them. In his teaching, he invited people to focus on earth as it is in heaven, on daily bread and the forgiveness of debts. His parables and metaphors did the same, through seeds planted, dough kneaded, and lost sheep found. Most of all, he reminded people they were not alone, that they were connected in God’s love, and that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
Those who followed him, facing the same risks from Rome, sought resilience in their struggle and connection in their grief. This may be why Paul chose an old piece of poetry, a note of Hebrew liturgy, to remind them of their connection to one another and of the purpose found in facing grief and loss.
“Blessed be the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, a gentle Father, the Mother of mercies and the God of all consolation, who comforts us in all our sorrows and affliction, so that we can offer others, in their sorrows and affliction, the consolation that we have received from God ourselves” (2 Corinthians 1:2–4).
The work we can take up in the face of life and death is making each breath matter. When Emerson said there was no reason for Waldo’s death, and when he said all time was wasted after Ellen’s death, it forced him to consider what in this life truly mattered and to be fully awake to the cycles of life and death, growth and decay, that never end. It would be easier to imagine pearly gates and golden streets. Absolutes are easy and seductive. But easy is not always healthy or healing.
Years later, in 1877, Louisa and her sister Anna, known as Nan, nursed their mother. There were no budget worries as there had been when they nursed Lizzy, but the work was the same. Family letters report that Louisa and her older sister Anna “carried Marmee upstairs to a sunny chamber with windows looking south, full of ‘flowers and the old fashioned furniture she loved.’ Abigail said to her daughters, ‘The power that brought me here will take the kindest care of me wherever I may be hereafter’” (LaPlante, p 258).
Abigail’s words, “The power that brought me here will take the kindest care of me wherever I may be hereafter,” hold the known and the unknown together. While many prefer absolutes that trade in fear of eternal punishment or quick assurances that hurry grief along, her words make space for mystery without terror. She names what is true: we do not know what comes next, and we do not need to be afraid. Her response calls us back to birth itself. Our entry into this world may have felt like a kind of death, leaving behind everything familiar, and yet we were received with care. We do not know what lies beyond what we can see and touch, but we do know love and connection. If we practice love, name love, and live into that connection, perhaps we too can say, with humility and hope, “The power that brought me here will take the kindest care of me wherever I may be hereafter.”
May it be so. Amen.
