Chapter Fifty-Five
QUINCY
Massachusetts
My heart broke when the carriage door opened to reveal my poor daughter—emaciated and worn down with pain, her once lustrous
hair now dull and brittle. For the cancer had returned—worse than before—and if I’d harbored hopes that more surgeries might
save her, they were extinguished now.
This time my beloved daughter had come home to die.
As her son lifted her from the carriage, her arm dangled weak and pale, for she had survived a courageous, nearly impossible
journey of more than three hundred miles in agonizing pain. We settled her upstairs, where, despite the summer’s heat, she
shivered under three quilts. Her children and I sat beside her, my thumbs worrying over her bony fingers until Nabby roused
herself from the opium.
Her eyelids heavy, her breathing slow and calm, she took one look at my shattered expression and said, “It’s all right, Mama.”
No, I thought, denying what my eyes clearly saw—that despite seeing her through the trials of a brutal surgery, the Lord had
now seen fit to let cancer eat her alive. How could she say that anything was right about this?
But as my insides flailed in view of the chasm of heartbreak before me, Nabby’s blue eyes were serene. “I am perfectly sensible
to my situation. Grateful for the life I’ve led. For the love I’ve given and received. For the children bestowed upon me.
I’m reconciled to my end.”
Well, I was not reconciled to it!
I shook my head so hard I hurt my own neck, wishing away this tragedy. I wanted to scream and howl at the injustice of it.
Not my Nabby. Not my precious girl. Not the young girl who had been my closest companion in those long days of the war without
John. Not the young woman so full of life who had married the man of her heart. Not the mother who had already suffered torments
no one should ever be called to endure.
It took all my strength to simply hold her hand and offer comfort and calm. But her eyes pleaded with me to be calm. “Mama, I want to choose my own hymnal for my funeral, but I’m too tired to hold the book. Will you turn
the pages for me?”
I nodded, one of the few times in my life I was unable to speak. So dark were my thoughts about an unmerciful God that I feared
to hold the hymn book lest it singe my fingertips. Nevertheless, I held the hymn book for her in my own shaking, age-spotted
hands and let her choose “Longing for Heaven.”
She spoke of other final arrangements with a contentment and gentleness meant to ease the pain of all those who loved her.
I admired this strength in my daughter. A strength I had not often recognized for its silence, but which had always been present
from the days she ran to fetch help when I had dysentery, to the way she endured bankruptcy, abandonment, and disgrace. And
through it all, she’d protected her family to the very end. Even to the point that when, to everyone’s surprise, Colonel Smith
had been elected to congress, she insisted he remain in Washington City until he was satisfied that he had done his duty for
the war effort. It cost her the comfort of her dearest friend whilst she lay dying, but her chief concern was for her husband’s
honor.
While we awaited his imminent arrival, we all tended her. Sally took charge of the medications. Tommy helped write letters
for his sister to those she wished to say farewell. Nabby’s children read to her from books when she had the strength to listen.
And the other grandchildren made themselves quiet in the house so that Nabby could rest.
I sat with my daughter during the day, but it was my husband who kept her company in the worst, most agonizing hours of the night.
Despite his arthritic knees, he went up and down the stairs with trays of milk toast, stewed peaches, snipped roses from the garden, or little books of verse—anything to cheer or distract her from the pain.
One evening, when we went to her together with an old bundle of letters from our time together in Paris, Nabby was too tired
to read them, but her gaze lingered on the lace that bound them. “What extraordinary parents I have,” she said, eyes soft
and dewy. “I hope I have been in my life a source of comfort to you, if not pride.”
My husband looked away, a knot bobbing in his throat. He had to clear it before he could speak. “No child could be more so . . .”
A wilting smile passed over Nabby’s lips. Then, spent of energy, she closed her eyes. “I dined on warships,” she said, dreamily.
“I saw London. I saw Paris. I danced at balls with ministers of state. I fell in love. Had beautiful children. My father was
the President of the United States. And my mother . . . oh, how God blessed me to have such a life and such a mother.”
It was too much. I stood rigid, overwhelmed by her grace. Then I fled.
In the hall, I pressed my forehead against the door, trembling with my efforts not to wail. I cursed myself for my weakness
when my daughter was so courageous, but I could not contain myself and gasped with wet sobs for the grief of what was soon
to come.
In the end, our daughter died clasped in her husband’s tearful embrace, surrounded by her family. She’d smiled through the
agonies to spare our hearts, then cheerfully surrendered her life to her Maker.
At the funeral, the well-meaning reverend reminded me that Nabby was partaking of that immortality brought by him who endured
the cross and went before to prepare a place for her. So, I could resign her into the hands of that being who gave her to
me and had the best right to take her.
But it was the worst affliction of my life.
I will never recover from this, I thought. Oh, I might still float through existence in this aging body. But I’d never wish for life’s continuance.
It was Nabby who had first made me a mother. She had thus, in some sense, defined my adult life as much as my marriage to John. Now I scarcely knew myself.
With Nabby, all my daughters were dead and gone, buried in the soil of a country that did not value them, and lost to a world
that never deserved them.
My husband, too, seemed lost.
One evening I found him sitting on the bottom stair, head in his hands. Instinctively, I sat beside him, and he turned to
my shoulder and sobbed. “I keep thinking I must go up to bring her a tray of supper, only to remember she’s gone. Our baby
girl, our precious jewel. She’s gone, forever.”
It was the way of nature that, in old age, one begins to lose everything acquired in life. We lose friends, family, hair,
teeth, the ability to see and hear. Everything goes, and every day, we grow less attached to that which makes life worth living.
But it is unnatural to bury a child, and we had buried four.
In the miserable year after my daughter’s death, meetings where sermons and psalms had so often sustained me now felt a hollow
exercise. Our prayers—whether for our country or for our family—had been coldly and brutally refused.
Our punishment, perhaps, for thinking ourselves creatures of free will. For having the temerity to believe that our good works,
that our choices—moral or otherwise—might justify an earthly reward.
In the end, maybe the Calvinists were right that we were merely puppets upon God’s stage, preordained to succeed or suffer
only at the whims of our Divine Creator.
These thoughts burned a hole in my heart.
So, when I went to the First Parish Church it was not for the scripture, but to visit the sepulcher where Nabby was buried.
I planted flowers and herbs and shrubbery, speaking to my daughter as if she could still hear me. I told her of the progress
of my garden, of her father’s aches and pains, and of her son, who was now defending New York’s harbor against the British
as an officer in the 2nd Battalion, 11th Regiment of Artillery, State Militia.
But I didn’t tell her how poorly the war went for us.
We’d lost the Battle of Queenston Heights on the Niagara. The British were blockading the Chesapeake Bay. And as I knelt by Nabby’s grave and dug in the dirt, I knew full well that redcoats had landed in Maryland and were now marching on our capital.
If I weren’t so miserable and defeated, I’d have laughed at the perversity of it. If the British conquered us again, it would
mean the final unraveling of all John and I had dedicated our lives to.
I could find no purpose to it.
No purpose to the entirety of my life, for I was no mother anymore. God had taken my children, one by one. First little Susanna,
then the daughter who died before I could name her. Then Charles and Nabby. Thomas behaved as a distant stranger now, always
drunk. And John Quincy was a world away . . .
By death, drink, or distance, they were all gone.
And perhaps now we’d lose the country, too.
It was all, everything, falling to pieces.