In order to provide better care for Denny, our family had moved back to the United States in 1953. We lived in North Carolina briefly, but when Dad was hired as the assistant director of the English as a Foreign Language program at American University, we moved to Falls Church, Virginia. The fifth McAuliffe baby, Margarita, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1954.
Denny died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the spring of 1956, when he was almost four years old. Jack had just turned eleven; Tom had just turned ten; I was seven; Margarita was almost two years old. Margarita has said she has no memory of Denny at all. Of course, not having any memory of her little brother doesn't mean she escaped the impact of his illness and his death -- none of us could escape that.
Sadly, at the time of Denny's death, there was no such thing as family grief counseling -- none of us had any professional help or counseling at all. My parents were deep, deep in their own grief, and I think the prevailing wisdom at that time was to simply not talk about the death of a child. Whether I'm right about that or not, I do know that we did not talk about Denny's death -- or his life. Once he was buried, it was almost as though he had never existed. I don't believe I even cried when he died; I know I didn't cry at the funeral.
So now we finally come to the subject of this blog post -- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. My great aunts, May and Marge Quigley, sent me this wonderful book when I was nine or ten years old. I read and reread it many times over the years, but the first time I read it was the first time I cried -- finally -- over the loss of my brother. Not until I cried over the Beth's death did I cry for Denny.
Probably for most girls, Little Women was about the tension that almost every girl experiences between wanting to be completely herself -- to be able to dream about being anything and anyone -- and the messages that we get from the world around us about what a woman "should" do and who she should become. In many ways, this book is a precursor of the whole discussion about whether or not a woman can "have it all." And while I know this book certainly informed my ideas about having a profession and/or having a family, the real impact this book had was that it allowed me to finally grieve for my darling little brother.
Denny is buried in a cemetery in Herndon, Virginia, in an unmarked grave. In 1999, I went to that cemetery, and there just happened to be a woman there who knew where the unmarked graves of child who died in that time period were located. Even now, as I write this, tears come to my eyes -- tears for the life that ended far too soon, but tears also for my mother, who never ever was able to voice her grief over the death of her beautiful child. I am so grateful to Louisa May Alcott for helping me express my grief for Denny. I think crying about Beth's death was far more beneficial than any self help book I've picked up since.
