What dreadful news you gave me of Sam O, Martha I sometimes feel that a fearful doom rests on our family—And yet tis so wicked to question the designs of Providence or seek there an excuse for our misfortunes.
But why in every condition in life we must meet with disappointment and failure is to me a mystery. . . . Abi’s visit to Mary has been constantly before my mind. I long to hear the particulars in a letter from her. I hope it will not make dear Abi worse, though such a picture of suffering and misery is enough to break a sisters heart. But Mary! poor Child—Alas what words can express her condition Everything is nought compared to that. One year and a half confined to her bed, and perhaps now there is not even a hope that she will ever be able to rise again, though how long life may last, God alone knows.13
These were years that were extremely difficult on Patterson, improvident husband that he was. A sort of tough affection held together the two rather battered warriors in life’s struggle. There were sometimes quarrels between them, when his irresponsibilities and her nerves met and clashed; yet somehow love persisted. Shortly before George was taken out west, she wrote a poem “To my absent husband” with the refrain, “I think of thee! I think of thee!” After expressing her longing for the absent one, the poem ended:
Since first we met—through weal and wo
It hath been thus and must be so
Till bursting bonds our spirits part
And love divine shall fill this heart.14
He, on his part, wrote her a letter from Sanbornton Bridge in either 1857 or 1859, which shows very clearly his own feeling. Addressing ● ● ●
13 Martha Baker Pilsbury to Martha Rand Baker, 6 June 1857, 1920.015.0015, LMC. It is not clear what the tragedy to “Sam” was, unless the reference was not to her brother Samuel but to his son of the same name. The young man was lost at sea about this time.
↑14 Mary Baker Patterson, entry dated February 1856, “To my absent husband,” poem, A09001, p. 57, MBEL. This appears under the title “Constancy” in her published Poems (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1938), p. 3.
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