John Phillips had died abruptly by heart attack on the evening of May 28, 1823, soon after the passing of his own mother, the only grandmother that Wendell had known. While recovering from one family loss, Wendell had to face a second one, far more grievous and unexpected.26 It was, no doubt, the terrible shock of his father’s death that caused the boy to repress his memory of John Phillips, to whom he seldom referred in subsequent years. “The heart in such a plight forgets,” he once consoled a bereaved friend, “but I would not say more, being a poor hand at such thoughts. What griefs I have,
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