2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s last flight to Maui.
by Ron J. Jackson, Jr.
Charles A. Lindbergh stared at death on a mid-August afternoon in 1974. He did so just as he stared at the open ocean beneath him during his legendary, solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 – fearlessly.
Cancer had ravaged his 72-year-old body by then. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma the previous October, and in the ensuing months, doctors administered blood transfusions and chemotherapy. The radiation caused him to drop thirty pounds on his already lean frame, and as one biographer noted, “for the first time he looked his age.”
A 26-day stay at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York ended with one, sobering reality: Doctors could do no more. The famed aviator was dying.
Lindbergh turned to his beloved wife, Anne, and shocked her by saying, “I want to go home – to Maui.”
Four years earlier, Lindbergh built a rustic, A-frame home on a hundred acres of plush grassland near the remote village of Kīpahulu in southeast Maui. Lindbergh loved the people of Maui, as well as the solitude of the remote Hawaiian home, where the incoming dirt road often washed out after heavy rainstorms. He felt protected there, and the locals felt protective of him.
The house he christened “Argonauta” offered no electricity. He and Anne instead used propane to power the appliances and kerosene to fuel the lighting. This was Lindbergh’s paradise, and now he wanted to return there to die – and to be buried.
The brave pilot who became the first to survive a solo flight across the Atlantic knew where in the Pacific he wanted to spend his last days: 100 acres near a remote village of Kīpahulu in southeast Maui.
Doctors warned him he’d never survive the flight back to Hawaii. Lindbergh doggedly ignored their objections and arranged for a flight against their orders. “I love Maui so much,” Lindbergh said. “I would rather live one day in Maui than one month in New York.”
On Aug. 19, Lindbergh was secretly laid across a row of first-class seats on a United DC-8 behind a section curtained off from other passengers. He and Anne were joined by two of their three sons, Jon and Scott. Land, their third son, would meet them in Hawaii. Reeve Lindbergh – the youngest of the five surviving Lindbergh children – acknowledged the journey felt “legendary” in her diary, “mythical even.” Reeve proudly added, “the three sons taking their father back to the homeland…”
Lindbergh, of course, survived the flight from New York to Honolulu and then a short, ambulance plane ride to Maui. Anne would later compare her husband’s last flight to his legendary solo flight of 1927, noting, “no one believed he could do either and survive.”
For the next several days, Lindbergh took ownership of his death, from arranging the construction of his traditional Hawaiian grave by local friend Tevi Joseph Kahaleuahi, Sr. to the design of his hand-hewn coffin to the biblical-inspired epitaph on his headstone. He even selected the humble clothes he would wear: a pair of worn, gray cotton pants and a khaki shirt with no belt or shoes. He even signed a book contract for his unpublished autobiography.
Lindbergh left no detail to chance.
“I had feared that frustration over the weakness in his body would betray him into helpless anger and hopeless dependency, both unbearable for me to witness,” Reeve wrote later. “I should have known better.”
Reeve told her father that it was “wonderful for us, his children, to see how he faced this,” and he replied in a typical, testy fashion that it wasn’t a question of ‘facing’ anything. Lindbergh proved pragmatic and philosophical in the end, saying he viewed death as “no longer an ending, but an opening.”
Lindbergh drew his last breath on Aug. 26, 1974, with his wife by his side. He was buried in a traditional Hawaiian grave lined with lava rock on the grounds of the nearby Palapala Ho‘omau Church, which was first built in 1864 on a majestic cliff overlooking the ocean.
Lindbergh’s book – Autobiography of Values – was published posthumously in 1977. The last paragraph in the book fittingly reads: “I am form and I am formless. I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal … the molecules of my being will return to the earth and the sky. They came from the stars.
“I am of the stars.”