Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [251]
Peikoff spent many days and evenings by her side. He guarded others’ access to her. One evening, Mimi Sutton phoned to wish her aunt a belated happy birthday; there had been no answer when she called on February 2. Mimi was shocked to learn from Peikoff that her aunt was gravely ill. “Miss Rand cannot possibly come to the phone,” he said. Mimi would not take a near stranger’s haughty dismissal as final. She found the doctor in charge of Rand’s case and secured his permission to speak to her aunt. Peikoff was absent on the evening when she called again, and Eloise gave the phone to Rand. “I’m probably the last person she talked to who she knew who she was talking to,” Mimi told an interviewer in 1983. “I told her, ‘It’s Mimi. I love you,’ and we cried.”
Ayn Rand died on that night, March 6, 1982. The cause of death was congestive heart failure, or, as the nineteenth-century Romantic novelists and poets she had loved in her youth might have hinted, a broken heart. Newspapers around the world announced her death, and most were respectful of her accomplishments. Only a few, such as The New York Times and National Review, took the occasion to be cool or carping. Eight hundred friends and followers crowded into the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for the memorial service, where guards were posted, needlessly, to repulse the Brandens should they try to enter. One hundred gathered at the gravesite, in the snow, where David Kelley read another poem by Rudyard Kipling, the stoical “If.” She was buried next to the man she had loved as thoroughly as her lonely, driven, and revolutionary nature permitted her to love, in Valhalla, New York.
“It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end,” she liked to say. Of course, the world went on. But her extraordinary achievement extended far beyond the collapse, later in the decade, of the Communist tyranny she so abhorred, and still informs our thoughts about the competing values of liberty and safety, individual rights and the social contract, ownership and equity, and the sometimes flickering light of freedom.
AFTERWORD
Some of the central figures in Ayn Rand’s circle of the 1950s and 1960s are still at large.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN lives with his fourth wife, Leigh Horton, in a high-rise apartment in Brentwood. He maintains a therapeutic practice in his home office and by phone. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he published a dozen books of popular psychology, some of which were best-sellers, and as a result earned the appellation “father of the self-esteem movement.” In his writing and practice, he has remained faithful to Rand’s major tenets but has departed from her strict emphasis on rationality by restating the importance of emotions. Turning Rand’s maxim “Emotions are not tools of cognition” on its head, Branden advised a college audience to “feel clearly to think clearly” shortly after Rand’s death in 1982. Over the years, he has expressed regret for his harsh manner with former followers, saying in 1971, for example, “I feel I owe an apology to … every student of Objectivism who ever heard me lecture at NBI—not only for perpetuating the Ayn Rand mystique but also for contributing to that dreadful atmosphere of intellectual repressiveness that pervades the Objectivist movement.” In and out of his workshops and lectures, he makes it a special point to counsel Objectivists on emotional health. Yet in many ways, Rand remains Branden’s lodestar. In 2009, he was preparing to publish for the first time the twenty original lectures of the NBI series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,