he learned that Abigail Adams had died. He wrote warmly to John Adams, noting that words could do little in such an hour of grief, a lesson Jefferson had learned, he said, “in the school of affliction.”18 Still, “mingling sincerely my tears with yours,” Jefferson said, “it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”
