The delicate condition of Mrs. Jefferson's health, alluded to in the preceding letter, continued to be such as to excite the alarm of her friends, and their worst apprehensions were soon realized. After the birth of her sixth child she sank so rapidly that it was plain there was no hope of her recovery. During her illness Jefferson was untiring in his attentions to her, and the devotion he showed her was constant and touching. The following account of the closing scenes of this domestic tragedy I take from Mrs. Randolph's manuscript:
During my mother's life he (Jefferson) bestowed much time and attention on our education—our cousins, the Carrs, and myself—and after her death, during the first month of desolation which followed, I was his constant companion while we remained at Monticello....
As a nurse no female ever had more tenderness nor anxiety. He nursed my poor mother in turn with aunt Carr and her own sister—sitting up with her and administering her medicines and drink to the last. For four months that she lingered he was never out of calling; when not at her bedside, he was writing in a small room which opened immediately at the head of her bed. A moment before the closing scene, he was led from the room in a state of insensibility by his sister, Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive. The scene that followed I did not witness, but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself. He kept his room three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side. He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting-fit. My aunts remained constantly with him for some weeks—I do not remember how many. When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion—a solitary witness to many a burst of grief, the remembrance of which has consecrated particular scenes of that lost home[21] beyond the power of time to obliterate.
Mrs. Jefferson left three children, Martha, Mary, and Lucy Elizabeth—the last an infant. As far as it was possible, their father, by his watchful care and tender love, supplied the place of the mother they had lost. The account of her death just given gives a vivid description of his grief, and so alarming was the state of insensibility into which he fell, that his sister, Mrs. Carr, called to his sister-in-law, who was still bending over her sister's lifeless body, "to leave the dead and come and take care of the living."
Years afterwards he wrote the following epitaph for his wife's tomb:
To the Memory of
MARTHA JEFFERSON,
Daughter of John Wayles;
Born October 19th, 1748, O. S.;
Intermarried with
THOMAS JEFFERSON
January 1st, 1772;
Torn from him by Death
September 6th, 1782:
This Monument of his Love is inscribed.