Merciful God, consulting whom my husband shaped his every action, always believing that our destinies were in your hands, God beloved by my dear husband, who ever sought your guidance in fulfilling the duties of high office, please guide me now at this moment, when my husband stands at the brink of your kingdom.
For you, God, must have loved my husband, given his devout love for you. And you must know how truly my husband and I became one flesh, though mine was unworthy and ailing, which is why I was not at church every Sunday as my dear husband was, nor so much your loyal servant as he has been. And yes, perhaps that comes from a willful, stubborn spirit that refuses to bend itself to the fate of becoming a burden, a martyrdom even, to my dear husband, because I was not always so. Once I was strong and vigorous, a daily walker, vital enough to travel with my sister around Europe, determined enough to learn math and finance and work as a bank manager, reliable enough to take over my father's bank when he was away.
God please bring comfort to my husband, who believes in you even as he lingers near death, for when he finds the strength to speak, he says "Let God's will be done." But what else, I wonder, has ever unfolded than God's will, for it was surely not my own will to be stricken with nerve damage after the hard birth of my second child, to be made nearly lame in one leg, I who used to walk with such pleasure, and then worse, to be inflicted with what people call spasms or paroxysms or fits, so distressing to look upon that my husband would calmly throw whatever was at hand--a shawl, a napkin, a handkerchief--over my face until the seizure had passed. This surely was neither his will nor mine.
But perhaps this was by your design, because it made the people love him, when they saw the loving attention he lavished on an invalid wife--though I fought always to grow stronger--but oh God, if this was by your design I must admit it seems to me a strange way to accomplish your ends, to use the darkness of tribulation to let the bright light of my dear husband's self-sacrificing solicitude shine with such warmth.
But God, please bring the blessing of your love to your servant William McKinley, a love that I confess I began to question when, after a mere four months, you took our second daughter Ida from us before she even had a chance to bloom. God's will, not ours, my husband said then, just as he does now on the bed where he lies wracked with pain and fever, struck down senselessly by an assassin who knows him not.
I know I should pray for divine mercy for this madman, and hope he may find forgiveness and salvation from eternal destruction, just as he was saved by my husband, who even as he lay with his beautiful white vest covered in blood from the assassin's bullet, told his men to prevent the mob from murdering the assassin. They say this man was an anarchist, like the assassins who recently murdered the French president, the Italian president, and the empress of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Sisi, who was beloved of the people.
Truly God, your ways are inscrutable, for my husband, too, was beloved of the people. He was loved by immigrants and laborers, whom he defended, and African Americans, for whom he harbored no prejudice, and by women, because he thought they deserved education and the vote. And under his guidance the currency stabilized and the terrible effects of the depression abated-- the depression that plunged him deep in debt due to his own kind nature, which led him to make loans to a friend who turned out to be unreliable. But God, with the intelligence and good fortune you gave me I was able to stake my own inheritance to cover my husband's debts. And so this crisis led to another success, which shows your love for your servant Will.
But what of Katie, God, why after blasting my health and taking dear Ida away, why did you have to take Katie, depriving us of the one comfort left to us? I asked myself, is this a punishment? And if so, for what? For whom?
If a punishment, it must have been for me, for my husband only ever sought to do right in the sight of you, God, and in the dictates of his own stern conscience. Even those who opposed his going to war with Spain to stop the suffering of the oppressed people of Cuba admitted that he only did so after long soul-searching and repeated attempts to preserve the peace. He went to war because he believed it was right, not because, as people said, yellow journalists like William Randolph Hearst pushed him into it so they could sell more newspapers. For your servant Will would never be pushed into sacrificing the lives of men for base reasons. Even after the ship Maine exploded in Havana's harbor, killing more than 260 men as they slept, and everyone screamed for blood, my husband asked for a commission to investigate the actual cause of the destruction, which was determined to be a mine.
If as my dear husband says, everything is part of your plan, this explosion and the subsequent war, which my husband tried to avoid, must have been your will, and indeed very few Americans died in it, and many great men were made, one of them being Theodore Roosevelt, leader of the Rough Riders, whom I urged my husband to send to Cuba, where he won the acclaim that led to him now being vice president.
And yet, I sometimes wonder, God, at what your will must be, because in making peace with Spain my husband found himself obliged to annex the Philippines, another Spanish protectorate. You yourself know how he dropped to his knees and prayed for your advice about what to do, and that as a result he accepted the duty to educate and Christianize these poor people. In the resulting brutal struggle, which continues to this day, there must also be some divine plan, indecipherable to us as yet, if things are as my husband believes.
And yet are things as my husband believes? For here he is, at the dawn of his second term, loved by the people, and he is struck down by the Polish immigrant anarchist for no articulated reason. And in my heart, all I can think is, how could that man kill my husband? Why did he, how could he? My husband was no man's enemy. And yet now one more trial is being visited upon my husband who has the patience of Job, and who has only ever tried to do right.
Yet, God, in the cruelest of all twists of fate, my dear husband only recently learned that many of my medical problems were caused by the bromides he dosed me with constantly to prevent my seizures. After taking me to every doctor he thought might help me, he discovered that his own efforts were largely to blame. I accept, God, that you may have wanted to punish me, but why use as your instrument to do so the hand of your loyal and loving servant? And now with my new doctor at last bringing about a transformation, now that I am growing stronger and getting my wits back, an anarchist has struck him down. What did Job's wife say? "Curse God, and die."
So here is your chance, God. Save him. Save my dear Will. Yay, though he stands at the very brink of eternity, put divine inspiration into the minds of his doctors, gift them with your power to heal, not your endless power to blight. Let his fever break, his infection dissolve, his poor struggling heart be filled with the strength to beat on. Give me one miracle, God, in a life you have filled with sorrows.
Or failing that, dear God, if you must take my husband into your divine presence, there to be reunited with our precious Katie and Ida, then please God, God in whom I do not believe, I pray you take me as well, for I want to go if he does. I want to go too.
25: William McKinley