Why this Book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on reviews we’d read.

Summary in 3 sentences: The focal point of this story is the death of Lincoln’s son Willie a year after Lincoln assumed the Presidency and just as the Civil War was picking up momentum.  But there are many themes in this book, ranging from Lincoln’s character, to the mood of the country at the beginning of the Civil War, to the trivialities that consume most of us during life, to a rather bizarre fantasy look at how those in purgatory after death consider their own lives and the lives of those still living.  The book is a morality tale about what is important in life, how we take so seriously issues which from a larger perspective are trivial, told in the context of a key window in American history, centered around the suffering of one of America’s great leaders.

My impressions:  This book is not for everyone – it is not a page-turning “fun” book to read.  It is a very different book, written in a style that is a combination of poetry, drama, and short vignettes. It was not difficult to read, and I in fact found the unique style interesting, and part of the author’s message. But it is not exactly a page-turner. I’d recommend it to a thoughtful person who thinks a lot about life and death, is willing to experiment with a different style of literature, and does not demand that a book (or a television show, or movie for that matter) be attention-grabbing entertaining to be edifying.

The story takes place over a single night in a cemetery in Washington DC, and consists largely of conversations between “residents” of the cemetery – those who are stuck there in purgatory, after death, but not yet ready for whatever comes next.   It also includes views of what was happening in the world of the living with excerpts from letters, diaries, first person accounts of people close to Lincoln, or from those who observed or were reacting to him while he was dealing with the illness and death of his son.  It also includes reactions to him as President at the early stages of the Civil War, which reveal how he was hated and vilified by many who did not support the Civil War.    The story is built around the historical fact of Lincoln actually going alone in the middle of the night to visit the crypt where his son Willie had just been buried, the night after the funeral.  The book includes passages from witnesses that verify that visit.

While the centerpiece of the story is the death of Willie Todd Lincoln, and Lincoln’s visit to his crypt, the book is about so much more. A key aspect of this book was the character of Lincoln: his devastating sadness after the death of his favorite child, but also at the enormity of death that he foresaw resulting from the war over the Union and slavery.  We are also given passages that offer clues about the chaos and challenges of his family life, and later in the story, the ghosts in the cemetery get into Lincoln’s head and we get clues about his youth and events that shaped him.

The short excerpts of letters and impressions from actual people of that day create an image of a much divided America and a President under siege,  unsure of his ability to govern well in these very turbulent times.  When his son died, Lincoln lost a major source of joy in his family life, which added enormously to his stress under the turmoil he was experiencing as President.   The impressions of his actual contemporaries and of the fictional ghosts in the cemetery repeatedly emphasizes how sad Lincoln was, and how he steeled himself to continue, with a strong sense of duty and principle.

Through the letters and remembrances of Lincoln’s contemporaries and the stories of the ghosts, Lincoln in the Bardo offers us many insights into the culture of America in the first half of the 19th century.  The crypt where Willie Lincoln’s casket was placed was in a  white upper class cemetery, but was adjacent to a black cemetery, and ghosts from the black cemetery join into the interactions surrounding Lincoln’s visit.  We get to know them, and their unwillingness to let go of anger and sometimes horrific abuses they experienced in life, as well as the continued bigotry and attachment to a sense of racial superiority of some of the ghosts in the white cemetery.

The ghosts in the cemetery, share not only how they perceive Lincoln as he visits his son,  but also their own lives, their petty grievances, the things that they remained attached to from their already-lived lives:  their loved ones, their angers and resentments, guilt, their unfulfilled ambitions and dreams, their sadness.   These attachments from their incomplete lives were what held them in purgatory – willingly.  They chose to stay there – they were attached to their attachments.   We see in the story how giving up the things that were unfinished in their lives, was essential to their moving on.  The book never reveals just what “moving on” meant – to what – whether “heaven” or back into the cycle of  birth and rebirth, or something else.  But in Lincoln in the Bardo Saunders makes clear that being stuck in purgatory is not a place where one evolves – spiritually or otherwise.  One is stuck there, until one is ready to, decides to, let go.

Evolving spiritually is a key theme of this book.  Some die and seem to go straight to that next stage – whatever that is – and some stop briefly in “the Bardo” before they move on.   Others – like most we meet in this book – are stuck there for as long as it takes for them to be willing to let go of whatever passion or attachment holds them there, before they can  move on. Many were unwilling, but some attained insights during this story, and with a “poof” – what Saunders referred to as the “bone chilling fire-sound of the matterlightblooming” – they disappeared – moved on to that next stage, leaving whatever remnants of their earthly life behind.  The message – we can always learn and evolve – if we’re willing.

While Lincoln is the central figure in this story, his son Willie is a key figure as well.  In fact, Willie lands in the Bardo because of his strong attachment to his father, and this attachment is mutual.  Willie is much admired by the ghosts in the cemetery and they want to protect him from some of the pathologies of those still inhabiting the cemetery.   In the end, we see that both Abe and Willie Lincoln have to let go of each other to move on – Lincoln to get back to being the head of his family and to leading the country, and Willie to move on from “the Bardo,” to whatever comes next.

“Bardo” is a sanskrit word for “in between state” and comes from the stages of the afterlife described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and other Buddhist scriptures. One can read more about the Bardo and the Buddhist stages of the afterlife by googling “Bardo.”

Lincoln in the Bardo recalled to me four other books I’ve recently read:  Our Town by Thornton Wilder features people in a cemetery looking back on their lives, struggling with letting go, and dismayed by how little they appreciated what they had while they were still living.    Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Masters is a book of one page prose/poems,  each “written” by the person under the headstone in a cemetery in a small midwestern town, sharing their angers and unfinished business from unfulfilled lives.  Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw is a conversation between interesting, charming, and gregarious people enjoying the good life of earthly pleasures in hell, arguing that hell is a much more fun place to spend eternity than heaven.  Why would anyone want to go spend eternity contemplating spiritual beauty and God?  And finally in The American Book of Living and Dying, by Groves and Klauser a minister describes how he helped eight terminally ill people prepare for their own peaceful deaths by helping them to let go of passions that were so important to them in life, but which were keeping them from dying in peace.

One final note.  In the Lincoln in the Bardo, Lincoln opens the casket of his dead son and gazes upon him and actually holds him – though it is never clear if this act was actually verified. To us this seems a strange, even macabre thing to do.  But Ralph Waldo Emerson, three decades earlier,  is known to have done the same with his deceased first wife Ellen, whom he dearly loved and who had died of tuberculosis at age 20 soon after they were married.  So perhaps at the time it was not as unusual as it might seem to us.