Mary Todd Lincoln
This is also a prevalent situation when the narrator parallels his life to that of Mary Todd Lincoln and Henry Adams. Throughout the story, while reading the diary of Mary Todd Lincoln, titled "Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters", the narrator makes connections between his grief and that of which Mary Todd Lincoln went through when her husband, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Mary Todd Lincoln “grieved till she died – in a more ostentatious manner – who, you might say, tried to move on and couldn’t” (20). Henry Adams, who had to deal with the suicide of his wife, went through a similar situation. He tried to move on with his life “but when someone asked him to speak to a historical society years later, he turned and said, ‘But didn’t you know? I’ve been dead for fifteen years” (86). Both Henry Adams and Mary Todd Lincoln felt as if their life was cut short when their loved ones died without them. These feelings mirror what the narrator feels when his mother dies. With the guilt and the despair of missing his mother, the narrator feels as though his life is gone as well, even if he still is physically living. He wonders within his head one day while teaching if “[the students] will look up across the table and discover that their teacher is also dead” (75). The idea that grief overtakes someone's life is the common theme as seen with the example of the narrator, Mary Todd Lincoln and Henry Adams. Grief comes to be the idea that one cannot overcome the idea of living without someone they love because “after someone you love dies, you are homeless, really, because your home was once with them” (142). This theme is the overpowering theme and motif throughout the story.