First published in 1958, LINDA is the life story of a real little girl who died at age 8 on November 16, 1950. The book  is a spiritual memoir, a catalog of a mother's memories of her deceased child and the things they did together in her short life.

LINDA is a story about a mother's love for her daughter and a daughter's love for her mother. It is a story about the loss of a child, grief, emotional pain, spiritual growth, healing, and grief recovery.

LINDA is a story of learning to live with the loss of a loved one.

LINDA is a story about a vision, a journey of faith, spiritual rebirth, the power of prayer, and ultimately faith in God.

Linda-Angel.com was created to ensure that the book, LINDA, remains available to as many readers as possible. LINDA may be read in both HTML format and PDF format.

For many months after the death of my little girl, in November of 1950, when the miraculous vision and the church records coincided, I told the story to many people. They all wanted to listen.

But, after awhile, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, I grew exhausted. I began to leave things out.

I still felt, however, the tremendous impulse to tell it. I was impelled to tell it, for I could not hold it within me. I wanted to help others believe as I had been shown how to believe, particularly parents.

When I was granted, quite suddenly, a voice scholarship at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, with the great artists John Charles Thomas and Madame Lotte Lehmann, in the summer of 1951, I rode out on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and returned by the Northwest Passage on the Milwaukee Road. The train company kindly rerouted my ticket.

In Seattle, Washington, I had a sister, Celeste, whose husband is Dr. Morton E. Bassen. He arranged for me to tell the story into a dictaphone, and he had his secretary type it. He tested me for extrasensory perception at the same time. He is interested in ESP, as many people are today. Nothing significant was found.

Thus the twenty-two pages, the nucleus of a book, suddenly were there in my hands. From this, all the writing has stemmed and has grown into three separate books, the first one completed being Linda.

Eleanor B. Wasserman

When the author first came to me some time after the death of her daughter, I knew her to be struggling with a grief too great to bear without some effort on her part to justify the bitter pain of bereavement—to find some working answer to the enigma of human existence. Her quest led her over a curious path but through the same valley of decision and faith countless others have encountered and will encounter. It is to help the latter that she was led to write her book.

Some may have some difficulty in accepting the author’s interpretation of the events after her daughter’s death. I do myself, although I was to some extent involved in them. I still remember my astonishment when she produced the crayon sketch of the church seen in her dream. It was the prerestoration church of which I was then rector and which she could never have seen. Whatever the valuation placed on this incident, it was the turning point in her life, but it does not in any way affect the validity of the Christian position she reached through her Judeo–Christian background.

Some will find their chief interest of the book in the thorough knowledge of Old Testament religion revealed by the author, and how she found its fulfillment, and hers, in the Christian Church. Others will be moved by the personal experience of the author and, perhaps, find hope in their own situation. At least they will feel that a deep experience shared by them has been put into simple and expressive words, and be glad.

James S. Cox
Dean of St. Andrew’s Cathedral
Honolulu, Hawaii