Wilt thou not wait for me my friend,
Or give a longer lease?81
Thoreau understood Emerson’s position and intent in his kindnesses and help, but at times he also may have misconstrued them.
But he goes unappeased
Who is on kindness bent.82
He may have felt that Emerson demanded something greater, had an expectation that could not be fulfilled. Thoreau was trying to establish his own voice, a voice of defiant self-reliance that asked, “If I am not I, who will be?”83
Whatever temporary impasse these friends may have been experiencing, something unexpected brought them a shared and overpowering grief when the beginning of 1842 saw tragedy strike both the Thoreau and Emerson families. “I begin my letter,” Lidian wrote her sister, “with the strange sad news that John Thoreau has this afternoon left this world.”84 John had cut his left-hand thumb while stropping his razor on New Year’s Day. Not thinking it serious, he replaced the missing skin and bandaged it. Although within a few days it began to cause him pain, not until January 8 did he actually remove the bandage. The flesh was foul smelling, discolored, and darkened. Gangrene had set in.
The skin had already begun to mortify when John visited Dr. Josiah Bartlett that Saturday evening. The Concord physician examined and redressed the wound. Although his father, also Dr. Josiah Bartlett, had written a pamphlet in 1808 on tetanus and the use of amputation as a cure, Bartlett did not find any reason for concern. There are no medical records to explain why he was not alarmed. On his way home John began to experience pain in various parts of his body. He was barely able to complete the one-third-mile walk. By morning his jaw was stiff. Excruciating spasms that evening confirmed the onset of lockjaw. Thoreau was called home from the Emersons’.
On Monday, the doctor told John that it was too late for anything to be done, and that his death would be quick but painful. “Is there no hope?” he asked. The doctor replied simply, “None,” to which John said, “The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?” Lidian reported that John retained “his senses and some power of speech to the last. He said from the first he knew he should die—but was perfectly quiet and trustful—saying that God had always been good to him and he could trust Him now. His words and behavior throughout were what Mr. Emerson calls manly—even great.”85
Later that day John took leave of his family, all but his brother. Henry remained when everyone else had left the room. He sat down and talked, as John had asked him to do, about nature and poetry. “I shall be a good listener,” he said with what strength and humor he could muster, “for it is difficult for me to interrupt you.” The next day, in his final hour, John looked at his brother with what Thoreau described as a “transcendental smile full of Heaven,”86 although it was likely the risus sardonicus caused by muscle spasms. Henry returned a smile. This was the last that passed between them. John died on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 in his brother’s arms.
In the evening Thoreau walked the half mile to Emerson’s house to see his friend, “but no one else,” as Lidian wrote. One does not know, one can only imagine, the conversation that took place behind the closed doors of Emerson’s study. The death of Thoreau’s brother could only have stirred memories of Emerson’s own fraternal losses. His brother Edward died in 1834 and, more parallel to Thoreau’s loss, Charles in 1836. He had described Charles to Lidian as “my noble friend who was my ornament my wisdom and my pride. . . . How much I saw through his eyes. I feel as if my own were very dim.”87 Passages from Charles’s journals were printed in The Dial, and Emerson paid tribute to both brothers in his poem “Dirge.”
What was said in the privacy of Emerson’s study is not recorded in the journals or correspondence of either man, although parts of it may have been conveyed to Lidian, who wrote,
He says John took leave of all the family on Monday with perfect calmness and more than resignation. It is a beautiful fate that has been granted him and I think he was worthy of it. At first it seemed not beautiful but terrible. Since I have heard particulars and recollected all the good I have heard of him I feel as if a pure spirit had been translated.88
When Lidian later asked Thoreau “if this sudden fate gave any shock to John when he first was aware of his danger,” he answered, “None at all.”89 It had been John’s belief that he would die early.90
The following morning Thoreau returned to Bush to get his clothes, unsure when he would return as a member of the Emerson household. Before noon he was back on Main Street with his family. Lidian loved “him for the feeling he showed and the effort he made to be cheerful. He did not give way in the least but his whole demeanour was that of one struggling with sickness of heart.”91 This sickness of heart with which Thoreau struggled would soon surface in a way that caused considerable alarm to his family and friends.
Edward Emerson remembered being told that the “shock, the loss, and the sight of his brother’s terrible suffering at the end, for a time overthrew Henry so utterly that . . . he sat still in the house, could do nothing, and his sisters led him out passive to try to help him.”92 Thoreau’s depression soon manifested itself physically. On Saturday, January 22, Emerson returned to Concord from Boston, where he had delivered the last lecture of his series “On the Times,” only to find his friend “ill and threatened with lockjaw! his brother’s disease. It is strange—unaccountable—yet the symptoms seemed precise and on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed and I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.”93
By Monday Emerson could write that Thoreau’s “affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, and what is best, his own feeling of better health established.”94 It was a slow process. “I must confess,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.”95 A month later Lidian was writing that “Henry is better—nearly well. But his headache or the cause of it, made his eyes so weak that he did not read or write much for two days or more.”96 Good health still wasn’t totally restored. In March Thoreau wrote that he had been “confined to my chamber for a month with a prolonged shock of the same disorder—from close attention to, and sympathy with him, which I learn is not without precedent.”97 A year later, on the anniversary of John’s death, Thoreau asked in his journal, “What am I at present?” He answered, “A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem.”98
The relief Emerson experienced over his friend’s returning health that January was brief. Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son, showed signs of scarlet fever. It began with a soreness of the