Handwritten letter: recollections of Mother's last illness (pages 2-3)

A handwritten letter spread, showing pages 2 (left) and 3 (right). The text continues from the previous scan. The left leaf has a burn/tear hole at lower-left, destroying a portion of the last few lines.

Page 2 (left)

Kate did not take much part in the bedside nursing but before the end every one felt that she was as fully able, & more comforting than any one else. — She & Mother were drawn together in a way they had never been before by Kate’s care of little Sam all winter, & by his illness & death — & though there was no change in their ordinary manner, Kate felt the difference, & tho’ she kept back at first, feeling that every one would think Mother safer in more experienced hands, she took her place & with quiet gentle ways, soothed Mother & with clear watchful judgment, did as much for her as a nurse, as any one else could — I knew all the time that it was so, but understood why she waited. — She has exerted herself untiringly ever since to help in what ever was [paper torn], & in talking to [paper torn] She told Mo[ther]

Page 3 (right)

she would. — We talk about Mother all the time, & tho’ nothing of the real blank has come home to us yet, because the house is so full all the time, & it is too strange to be real that we are to live on without her, still I have a helpless bewildered childish sense of her absence. I prayed all the time that she was sick that if through ignorance we were not supplying her with as much spiritual consolation as she needed that God would pardon us & give her all she craved. — I know she was sorry to leave us, & when she was first sick, she did not think of it, but when on Friday & Saturday she did not get better, I think she was willing to turn her mind upon it as a certainty, & the gentle way in which she said to Tody “I think I had better go” — “that is if it please[s]”