This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [79]
Bowditch was not prepared for the force of grief that overtook him. In Virginia to retrieve Nat’s body he sought “concealment” from others lest they witness the feelings he could not hide. He judged himself “ill fitted to see anyone” and was distressed by his “display of unmanliness.” In its implications of loss of control and of weakness, grief seemed to challenge and erode masculinity. Men would find it especially difficult to acknowledge their sorrow and truly mourn.49
When the solace Bowditch sought in faith and nation proved insufficient to mitigate his sorrow, he seemed bewildered that he was unable to contain his grief. With tears as “my constant companion,” he confessed, “my heart seems almost breaking.” But, he wondered, “why do I complain?” There could not have been “a more noble life or a more noble death.” What more could he have hoped for? But this knowledge was not enough. “My whole nature yearns to see & hear him once again.” For months, Bowditch found, “the full force of…affliction would press itself forwards and my first sorrow would return.” It was in vain that he sought refuge in “other sustaining thoughts” of God and country. Grief was so overpowering that his resolution to return promptly to regular life and work proved impossible. “For months at times I have been unable to work at all.”50
Henry Ingersoll Bowditch at the time of the Civil War. Harvard University Archives.
Bowditch found his feelings reflected in a poem entitled “My Child,” by John Pierpont, a fellow abolitionist, a Unitarian clergyman, and a friend. The poem, Bowditch wrote, “tells the tale far better than I can in prose the real story of my constant thought of my soldier boy” it represented the kind of sharing of sorrow Robinson and Cross had advised, and it offered as well a narrative of redemption from suffering and from death. The poet, like Bowditch, could not believe—could not “realize”—this son’s death. “I cannot make him dead!” the first line proclaimed. He saw his “fair sunshining head,” heard his footfall, expected his arrival, but “he is not there!” Like Bowditch yearning with his whole nature to see his son again, the poet at last accepts his child’s absence and then is free to ask the question that will lead to an alleviation of his pain: “Where is he?” The poem ends with the assurance that “we all live to God!,” that we all will meet “in the spirit land,” and “twill be our heaven to find that—he is there!” Accepting a son’s terrestrial death was the first step toward denial of his death in another realm, a sustaining affirmation that elsewhere he was still alive. Pierpont’s poem aided Bowditch in his effort to move to “Hope rather than Mourning.”51
At the same time Bowditch was struggling spiritually to deal with Nat’s loss, he also undertook actions within the world to express and relieve his grief, as well as to ensure Nat’s continuing presence in memory. Arranging for the body to be embalmed so that “it may be seen on my return to Boston” by Nat’s mother, fiancée, siblings, and friends, who were also in need of solace, Bowditch shared his sorrow with the dozens of mourners who attended Nat’s funeral. “You have not lost him,” Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s sermon comforted them; he was “not dead but alive with a higher life” he was “just the other side of the veil,” where “he says…I wait for you all.”52
Bowditch supplemented the formal rituals of religion with rituals of his own. From a ring given Nat by his fiancée together with a “cavalry button cut from his blood-stained vest,” Bowditch fashioned