Grief and Resolve

President's Day honors our nation's greatest presidents, among them Washington and Lincoln. Being From the Land of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln has always been my favorite President. From humble beginnings, he built a flourishing law practice based upon integrity and relationships. A moderate, he sought to bridge factions even as he wrestled with the great moral problem of slavery. Humble, he assembled a Team of Rivals, earned their trust through common sense wisdom, and collaborated in an effort to attain a more perfect union while addressing the vexxing question of equality. Days like today, I'm reminded of small signs along my home state where Lincoln stopped to speak, or slept, or had a meal. Yes, in Illinois, such small moments matter...

There is so much to celebrate of Lincoln's life, but today I am reminded of lesser known aspects of Lincoln's journey: his failings and personal losses and perseverance. Lincoln lost to Stephen A. Douglas in the 1858 Senatorial Race. Lincoln also lost his mother at the age of 11 and his first love died of typhoid fever. Finally, Lincoln lost two children too soon. 

The grief Lincoln must have felt comes into sharp focus upon a visit to Lincoln's Tomb. I never went there as a child, I attended as a chaperone of one of my kids's field trips (I'm ashamed to say I don't remember which one). We visited the state capital, walked the grounds of Lincoln's Springfield House and neighborhood and then visited the tomb. Alongside Lincoln lay his wife, Mary, and three of their sons. Two of these boys, Eddie and Willie, both died before they reached their teen years. As a consequence his wife, Mary, suffered from deep depression and melancholy. 

These deeply emotional setbacks combined with Civil War death tolls that are comparable to all other US wars combined (625,000 dead) created conditions in which historians now acknowledge that Lincoln himself suffered from depression. His deep grief, his endless pain, is something I can scarcely imagine. Yet he not only persevered: he took a broken nation on his shoulders and trudged on. 

Today, we sit on the edge of the end of a pandemic that has broken our ability to relate interpersonally, our children's ability to learn, our assurance in institutions such as government and science, and our society's ability to come together for common cause. We are unable to be empathic and vulnerable, unwilling to set our own views aside for the good of the masses, incapable of sitting in the discomfort of a sea of tulmult. 

Yet we celebrate the leadership of those before us who -- just like us-- suffered and grieved, broke and failed, and yet persevered.