First Family (2010)
“JOHN DID NOT THINK of the years that remained as a final chapter so much as an epilogue. With his partner of fifty-four years gone, he waited for the summons to join her and resume their conversation in the hereafter. (If it turned out there was no such place, his bodily remains would at least rest beside hers in the cemetery of Quincy’s First Congregational Church.) As he told Nabby’s daughter, he was ready to go at a moment’s notice, and growing increasingly impatient with “my distemper, Old ...Age, which I will not say with Franklin is incurable, because the ground will soon cure it.”1 He missed the daily banter with Abigail: the routine exchanges about children and grandchildren, Jefferson’s latest letter, John Quincy’s achievements as secretary of state, the annual manure shortage, Thomas’s embarrassing slide into alcoholism and permanent depression—the whole motley mix of large and small interests that, taken together, had filled their well-lived life together. He felt empty.MoreLess
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