Coming of Age: Madeleine Kunin’s Coming into Old Age Memoir
by Lori Lustberg

It is impossible to overstate the profound impact Madeleine May Kunin has had on women’s lives, hearts, and minds, as well as on the local, national, and international discourse on feminism and social justice issues. Kunin’s bravery, courage, and grace in stepping forward time and time again, as a public servant and an outspoken advocate on behalf of women’s rights, has changed the course of history.

In her new memoir, Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, we see a different side of Kunin than we have seen in her prior writings. Coming of Age is not a political book but rather, as she herself describes it, a “coming-into-old-age memoir,” in which the reader is privy to Kunin’s deeply intimate reflections on the physical and emotional aspects of aging. “Now that I am no longer involved in politics,” she says, “I can write differently. Now my skin has become more translucent. I can be more personal. I don’t wear the same shrink wrap I once sealed myself in. I can be more reckless without being judged.”

Kunin is a brilliant writer, and her memoir offers a rare look inside the heart of a uniquely inspired, inspiring and accomplished woman, now in her 80s and keenly aware of the limited amount of time she has left on Earth. In her words, “Death’s black raven perches on my shoulder from time to time. Even when he flies away, I know he is in the neighborhood.”

Interweaving poetry and prose, Coming of Age reads like a love poem dedicated to life itself, elegantly symphonic, blending soulful, contemplative, even mournful tones with joyous, fiery, impassioned ones. It is as if Kunin is the conductor of an orchestra: her emotions are the instruments, her words the conductor’s baton. And we, the enraptured audience, accompany her on an inner journey of joy, triumph, love, loneliness, longing, grief, regret, and worry.

Madeleine May was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1933, when her brother Edgar was 4 years old. Their father, Ferdinand May, had been drafted into the German army during World War I, “gassed and left for dead in the trenches.” Years later, he was hospitalized twice for depression at a Swiss sanatorium. The day before he was to be released the second time, he rented a rowboat, headed out on Lake Zurich, and never returned. Upon learning of his death, Kunin, then two and a half, was “too young to feel a thing.”

Today, she openly grieves for the father she never knew: “He must have planned it carefully. Did he plunge from the boat, or did he slowly slip, knowing he would not be able to rise again and breathe? What was it like in the dark depths? Were his eyes open or closed? Could he have changed his mind midway? The face of death may have frightened him. He might have struggled then, desperate to lighten his weight, regretting that he could not swim.”

“For a long time,” Kunin writes of her mother Renee, “she blamed herself for the hurt he had left for her on his bedside table. He thought it was a gift. ‘I am doing this for you.’” These words would come to haunt Kunin later, when her second husband was suffering from depression.

I Am Multiples (excerpt)

I abscond with the poet’s words
and claim them for my own
Or were they mine,
in the beginning?
I mouth them
with tongue and teeth,
and spit them in your face.

 

When Kunin was 6 and Edgar 10, Renee took the two children to the United States to escape the threat of Nazi invasion. The rest is history, or rather, herstory. Kunin put herself through college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, earned a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University, and moved to Vermont in 1957 to take a job as a reporter for the Burlington Free Press. In Burlington, she met Arthur Kunin, a doctor at the University of Vermont School of Medicine. They married in 1959 and had four children. During this time, Kunin earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Vermont and taught English at Trinity College. In 1970, when Arthur took a sabbatical year at the University of Bern, the family moved to Switzerland for a year. There, Kunin’s political aspirations took root: “It was 1971, the year that Swiss women were pressing for the right to vote. … Their arguments thrilled me. I decided that when we returned to the United States, I would get involved in the feminist movement. … I took the feminist call to action personally. It changed my timetable. I could re-renter the world beyond domesticity. … Yes, I would somehow do it all.”

In 1972, she was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives. Says Kunin: “I was a shy child. I am not sure how I learned to take the risk of running for office and exposing myself to the potential humiliation of defeat. To explain that I was propelled by my inner voice is too simple. But that is what happened when I gave my first speech to the House of Representatives. A Republican, Kenalene Collins, spoke against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. I could not bear to let her have the last word. I stood up and found my voice. My first victory. I made eye contact with the women sitting in the gallery watching the proceeding. We had campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment together. I had spoken not only for myself, but for them.”

Kunin served three terms in the Vermont House, and then was twice elected lieutenant governor of Vermont. In 1985, she became Vermont’s first female governor. At the time, Kevin Klose of the Washington Post, wrote: “Not since Ethan Allen captured a British fortress without firing a shot 210 years ago has any Vermont leader so bested the establishment’s odds as Madeleine M. Kunin, new governor of the nation’s most rock-ribbed and rural state. It’s more than that she is one of only two women governors in the country. Her triumph reads like an Irving Wallace fantasy: an immigrant Jewish woman Democrat rules flinty Yankee Vermont.”

She held the governorship for three terms, until 1991, having decided not to run a fourth time. In 1993, President Clinton appointed her US deputy secretary of education, where she served until 1996. In 1995, she and Arthur Kunin divorced. In 1996, Clinton appointed her US ambassador to Switzerland. In Coming of Age, we learn of the loneliness Kunin felt while serving in Switzerland: “I had come to Bern soon after my divorce from the man who was the father of our four children, and to whom I had been married for thirty-seven years. I did not have a partner. I felt the vacuum, especially when everyone had left and I was alone in a way I had never been before.”

In 2006, at the age of 72, her life took a fairy-tale-like turn when she fell in love and married John Hennessy, who was then 80 years old. Some years later, when Hennessy’s health began to decline, the couple moved to Wake Robin, a continuing care community in Shelburne. In the initial stages of his decline, Hennessy suffered from a deep, dark “depression that periodically overwhelmed him.” According to Kunin, “He was inside his depression, and I was left outside. I could not reach in to pull him out. Instead of rescuing him, I found myself slipping in. Depression can morph into a communicable disease.”

Echoes of her past reverberated: “I never thought that one day I would resemble my mother, trying to bring my husband out of his depression. John has no thoughts of suicide. At least, not yet. ‘I am doing this for you.’ I understand it better now, because those are the words that my husband says to me when he is suffering from depression and folds into himself. ‘I don’t want to burden you.’ ‘Don’t say that,’ I say. ‘Please.’”

After Hennessy suffered a series of falls, Kunin felt a familiar tug: “If he fell when I was with him, it would be my fault. If he fell when I was not with him, it would also be my fault, only more so. I found myself, as an old woman, reliving the tension I had experienced as a young woman. Should I give myself to the children, or should I venture out on my own life? We were fortunate to be at Wake Robin where help was always available. How terrible I had felt when I did not get home from giving a speech in time to watch my son blow out his nine birthday candles. I should have been there when I was elsewhere. Now the same dilemma haunted me. Should I go to my office and write, have lunch with friends, feed my own soul? Bad mother, neglectful wife, selfish woman.”

Planets

Seven new planets
circling a star
named Trappist-1,
forty light years
from our earth.
Swirling globules
all in a row,
there may be water;
there may be life.
I am entranced,
curious like
a wide-eyed child:
another earth,
another life,
I will not know.
I will not live
long enough.
I will not know
my newborn granddaughter
when she falls in love.

 

Hennessy reluctantly began to use a walker, and eventually a wheelchair, which he loathed. Somehow, throughout it all, Kunin’s infectious joie de vivre, her irrepressibly fiery, positive spirit, remained intact: “John hates his wheelchair. He hates being confined to a seated position while everyone else is standing. He hates not being able to make eye contact, not being able to join the conversation with great effort, and he hates being dependent on me—dependent on everyone. He can’t move without me. Sometimes his trapped anger bursts out: ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ So I tie my pace to his. I am held back by an invisible sash at my waist. When I untie it, I flout my freedom like a puppy unleashed.”

Hennessy died earlier this year, but not before Kunin penned the final words of Coming of Age:

A Love Poem

Each night
I wheel you to your door
with a kiss on your lips.
I smile my love at you,
generously, I think.
You don’t know how much I love
you, you say.
I do, I do.
We’ve formed a ritual
of waving good-bye as I retreat
slowly down the hall.
At first, I wave with one
hand in the air, and then
my arms go wild before
I turn the corner,
as if struck by a storm
or signaling for help.
We wave in tandem.
You are there, and I
am here.
The nurses now know
we wave not for them,
but for each another;
to have and to hold
the love we swore to
once and forever.
And I leave you in the hall,
with a kiss and a smile.

With Coming of Age, Madeleine May Kunin continues in her role as bearer of light for women everywhere. This time, she holds the lantern while walking gracefully, passionately and authentically toward her final years. Like the woman herself, Kunin’s memoir is exquisite.

Author Readings and Talks

Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties by former governor Madeleine Kunin
Green Writers Press, Brattleboro, VT 180 pages, pub. date October 2, 2018

October 2, Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. Book launch party at Shelburne Farms Coach Barn, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne. Event is free but reserve seats through Eventbrite. Cohosted by the Flying Pig Bookstore and Shelburne Farms with Green Writers Press and Cabot Creamery Cheese.

October 16, Tuesday, 7–8 p.m., Bear Pond Books: Book reading and talk at Bear Pond Books, 77 Main Street, Montpelier.

October 25, Thursday, 7 p.m., Phoenix Books: Book reading and signing at Phoenix Books, 191 Bank Street, Burlington.

November 1, Thursday, 6:30–8:30 p.m., Bridgeside Books: An evening with Madeleine Kunin at Bridgeside Books, 28 Stowe Street, Waterbury.

 

 

 

 

 

Lori Lustberg is a freelance writer specializing in financial, legal, and tax issues. She is coauthor and editor of Divorce & Separation: A Practical Guide to Making Smart Decisions (Vermont Edition), available at www.divorcebookvermont.com