My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

Silence is often the only weapon available to ladies. And I wield mine expertly.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that history is merely a set of lies agreed upon,

there are so many things I should like to forget. Forgetting would lift the weighty cloak of the past from my shoulders and make the present so much easier. But memory unalterably sets our compass, and guides us down paths we might have preferred never to have walked at all.

“Love is a thing beyond control. Passion is a thing beyond reason. It can’t be denied.”

This was, I thought, what it meant to be noble. Not a title conveyed by a king. Not by birth or blood. But through a learned and practiced strength of faith and character.

And, as you will find is so often the case in life, my dear Betsy, the only prudent thing to do was frown, make them humble, and forgive.”

“You are the best of wives, the best of women, and the best part of me.

“She never felt me hold her. She must’ve been frightened . . . and alone . . .” “You held her,” he whispered. “You held her inside your body. She wasn’t frightened, my angel. Not while she felt the strength of your love. And you must believe me, for who knows the strength of that love better than I do?”

Having never lost a child before, I couldn’t fathom the grief. Or that I would feel anything other than grief ever again. “I feel shattered. Broken in pieces.” “I’ll hold you together,” he said, making a bed for me of his whole body. “For once, let me hold you together.”

But any parent who has lost a child will tell you that grief is a monster less vanquished than held at bay. That, like love, survival is a choice to be made anew every morning, and sometimes one must pretend at being healed just to get through the day.

A marriage is like a union of states, requiring countless dinner table bargains to hold it together. There may be irreconcilable differences brewing below the surface that can come to open rupture. And there is, in a marriage, as in a nation, a certain amount of storytelling we do to make it understood. Even if those stories we tell to make our marriage, or country, work don’t paint the whole picture, they’re still true.

“If you’ve come to tell me you repent—that you’re sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and slanders you circulated against my dear husband—if you’ve come to say this, I understand. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”