● ● ● November 21, a short time before the date set for moving, Abigail died at the age of sixty-five and after more than forty years of married life. More revealing than Rust’s fervent obituary in the Patriot was the simple statement of one of her sisters in a letter some years later, “I loved most tenderly all my brothers and sisters, but she was a Benjamin.”77
What she meant and what her passing meant to her youngest daughter is more easily read in the latter’s life than in her words. A brief, choked letter to George the next day told the news. “I have prayed for support to write this letter,” she added, “but I find it impossible to tell you particulars at this time.” Then she burst out: “Oh! Geo, what is left of earth to me! But Oh, my Mother—she has suffered long with me[;] let me then be willing she should now rejoice, and I bear on till I follow her.”78
In a poem “To my Mother in Heaven,” published in the Patriot on December 20, Mrs. Glover’s feelings broke through the literary conventions of the period with a certain simple directness.79 George Baker, down in Baltimore, seemed to be as stirred by his sister’s plight as by his ● ● ●
77 Martha Smith to Mary Baker Patterson, 15 September 1858, Subject File, Mary Baker Eddy - Family - Smiths, MBEL.
↑78 Mary Baker Glover to George Sullivan Baker, 22 November 1849, 1919.001.0045, LMC. Two months earlier she had written to a friend who had recently lost her mother:
Rejoice then, my dear Friend, that her joy is unspeakable and full of glory. I know, a chord that hath been so harshly thrilled in our affections, and stilled forever! can yield but melancholy music, the echo of harp strings broken long ago! Yet to your well disciplined mind I need not speak of the importance to your self, not to dwell with aching memory on the past—“for it comes not back again.” The virtues of the parent stem dwell in the fruit and blossom, and the Mother still lives in her daughter—and with what pleasure and (I had almost [said] pride) you may perpetuate the living rembrance. I pray that you have found consolation in all these, and many more weighty considerations.
Mary Baker Glover to Priscilla Clement Wheeler, 28 September 1849, 1919.001.0011, LMC [bracketed text Peel’s].
↑79 See, e.g., the stanza:
I bless thee, Mother, precious guide,
For my most sacred share
In all the secrets of thy heart,
Thy sorrow and thy prayer;
Supporting faith be mine below,
Life’s parting words to greet;
Thy mantling virtues o’er me throw,
Till child and mother meet!
Mary M. Glover, “To My Mother in Heaven,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 20 December 1849, p. 4.
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