WASHINGTON
THE LONELY PLACE
THE TRAIN CARRYING THE BODY OF ELLEN AXSON Wilson pulled into the station at Rome, Georgia, at 2:30 in the afternoon, Tuesday, August 11, 1914, under gunmetal skies, amid the peal of bells. The casket was placed in a hearse, and soon the cortege began making its way through town to the church in which the funeral service would take place, the First Presbyterian, where Mrs. Wilson’s father had been a pastor. The streets were thronged with men and women come to pay their last respects to her and to show support for her husband, President Woodrow Wilson. They’d been married twenty-nine years. Family members carried the casket into the church as the organist played Chopin’s Funeral March, that dour, trudging staple of death scenes everywhere. The service was brief; the chorus sang two hymns that had been her favorites. Next the procession made its way up to the cemetery on Myrtle Hill, and the rain began. The hearse rolled past girls in white holding boughs of myrtle. Behind the girls stood townspeople and visitors, their hats off despite the rain.
An awning had been erected over the gravesite to shelter Wilson and the friends and family who made up the funeral party. The rain became heavy and thudded against the cloth. Onlookers saw the president tremble as he wept; those near at hand saw tears on his cheeks.
Afterward, the mourners moved back to their cars, and the spectators—a thousand of them—dispersed. Wilson stood alone beside the grave, neither speaking nor moving, until the coffin was fully covered.
With the death of his wife, Wilson entered a new province of solitude, and the burden of leadership bore on him as never before. His wife had died on Thursday, August 6, of a kidney illness then known as Bright’s disease, two days after Britain entered the new war in Europe and just a year and a half into his first term. In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking. The White House became for him a lonely place, haunted not by the ghost of Lincoln, as some White House servants believed, but by memories of Ellen. For a time his grief seemed incapacitating. His physician and frequent golf companion, Dr. Cary Grayson, grew concerned. “For several days he has not been well,” Grayson wrote, on August 25, 1914, in a letter to a friend, Edith Bolling Galt. “I persuaded him yesterday to remain in bed during the forenoon. When I went to see him, tears were streaming down his face. It was a heart-breaking scene, a sadder picture no one could imagine. A great man with his heart torn out.”