Ansel Adams by Mary Street Alinder

Author:Mary Street Alinder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16: Conclusions

By early 1950, Ollie, now eighty-seven years old and bedridden, was failing fast. In January, Ansel hired a night nurse for his mother so that his father, her very conscientious caregiver, could get some sleep. Suffering from pneumonia, Ollie sank into a coma, her eyes opening only at the time of her death, as if to see into the beyond. Her body shook in a death rattle as she released her last breath in her own bed on the evening of March 22, son and husband by her side.1 Later, the two men sat together by the fire, drinking hot toddies. Ansel knew his grieving father would not understand the relief he felt at his mother’s death.2

Charlie never recovered from the loss of his wife, sliding quickly toward his own death less than a year and a half later, on August 9, 1951. Ansel held his hand during the final hours as the family’s longtime cook and gardener, Harry Oye, dressed in his ceremonial robes as a Buddhist priest, lighted candles and silently prayed. Charlie’s passing was peaceful and warmed by the love he left on earth.3

The bodies of both Charles and Olive Adams were cremated, their ashes mixed together and buried unmarked under the thick green grass at the base of a woody thicket in the family plot at Cypress Hill Cemetery, in Colma, California. Charlie’s brother-in-law Ansel Easton, who had been instrumental in his financial ruination, is also buried there with his family, although an impressive carved granite obelisk towers over their remains.

Throughout the stressful months of his parents’ last days, Ansel poured out his heart in a torrent of letters to Nancy and Beaumont, confessing that he cried for the first time in his life when his father died.4 With great empathy, Beaumont wrote to Ansel about the death of his own father,

I could only wish for your father and for you so peaceful an ending . . . I wanted to tell you about my father because I do not know how else to tell how much I owe to him. If it had not been for [his] deep understanding, his confidence, his belief in what lay unknown and unexpressed within me, I would not have been able to develop the way I have.

So I think I know, Ansel, how you feel about your father. To look back over the years, to measure that love, is almost too much.5

Ansel’s letters to Beaumont and Nancy were usually covered with doodles and accented with a red typewriter ribbon. To one such letter, he attached a full-page drawing that summed up the Newhalls’ central importance to him: in a sketch of a heart, the right atrium held the initials BN, the left atrium was marked AA, and across both ventricles was inscribed NN.

Nancy was the one person with whom Ansel could be most himself. Her friendship grew rather than faded as she learned of the qualities he kept hidden from almost everyone else, such as his confirmed mysticism.

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