Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [273]
Congress had adjourned so that members could attend the service. Many of those present had attended the ball just nineteen days earlier—the vice president, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, General McClellan and his staff. As the funeral guests filed in, a frightful storm arose. Heavy rain and high winds uprooted trees, destroyed a church, and tore the roofs off many houses. After the service was concluded, a long line of carriages made its way through the tempest to the cemetery chapel where Willie was laid to rest temporarily inside the vault. Lincoln, who had so agonized whenever the stormy weather had pelted the grave of his first love, Ann Rutledge, perhaps found some solace that his son’s body was now sheltered from the rain and howling wind.
In the weeks that followed, Lincoln worried about Mary, who remained in her bed, unable to cope with daily life. Though Tad eventually recovered, Mary found it difficult to endure his company, which only intensified her sense of Willie’s absence. Nor could she bear to see Bud and Holly Taft. She never invited them back to the White House, leaving Tad utterly isolated. Understanding the situation, the president tried to keep his son by his side, often carrying the boy to his own bed at night.
Mary seemed to find some small comfort in her conversations with Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Jane Welles. The latter, who spent many nights keeping vigil at Tad’s bedside, had lost five children of her own and could relate to Mary’s sorrow. In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy, Mary tried to understand how the widow could bear to nurse the children of strangers after the devastation of her own family. Mary knew that she should surrender to God’s will, but found she could not. Looking back on Willie’s bout with scarlet fever two years earlier, she concluded that he was spared only “to try us & wean us from a world, whose chains were fastening around us,” but “when the blow came,” she was still “unprepared” to face it. “Our home is very beautiful,” she wrote a friend three months after Willie’s death, “the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled—everything appears a mockery, the idolised one, is not with us.”
Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that God had struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family’s exalted status. “I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else,” she acknowledged. She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that God must have “foresaken” her in taking away “so lovely a child.”
Nor could she fully accept the comfort Mary Jane Welles found in the belief that her children awaited her in heaven. If only she had faith that Willie was “far happier” in an afterlife than he had been “when on earth,” Mary suggested to Mary Jane, she might accept his loss. Although in later years she would come to trust that “Death, is only a blessed transition” to a place “where there are no more partings & and no more tears shed,” her faith at this juncture was not strong enough to provide solace.
Crippled by her sadness, Mary was drawn to the relief offered by the spiritualist world. Through Elizabeth Keckley, she was introduced to a celebrated medium who helped her, said Mary, pierce the “veil” that “separates us,