Hillary Clinton: What Happened

Back in our old house, I organized every closet in a blitz of focused energy that sent our dogs scurrying from every room I entered. I called friends and insisted they take a pair of shoes they’d once said they liked or a blouse I suspected would fit just right. I have often been that pushy friend, so most of them knew to expect it. I also organized jumbled heaps of photos into albums, threw out stacks of old magazines and disintegrating newspaper clippings, and sorted through probably a million business cards that people had handed me over the years. With every gleaming drawer and every object placed in its correct, appointed spot, I felt satisfied that I had made my world just a little more orderly.

Some of my friends pushed me to go on vacation, and we did get away with Chelsea, Marc, and the grandkids for a few days to the Mohonk Mountain House, a favorite spot of mine in upstate New York. But after twenty months of nonstop travel for the campaign—on top of four years of globe-trotting as Secretary of State—I just wanted to sit in my quiet house and be still.

I tried to lose myself in books. Our house is packed with them, and we keep adding more. Like my mother, I love mystery novels and can plow through one in a single sitting. Some of my recent favorites are by Louise Penny, Jacqueline Winspear, Donna Leon, and Charles Todd. I finished reading Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels and relished the story they tell about friendship among women. Our shelves are weighed down with volumes about history and politics, especially biographies of Presidents, but in those first few months, they held no interest for me whatsoever. I went back to things that have given me joy or solace in the past, such as Maya Angelou’s poetry:

On raw December days, with my heart still aching, those words helped. Saying them out loud made me feel strong. I thought of Maya and her rich, powerful voice. She wouldn’t have been bowed by this, not one inch.

I went to Broadway shows. There’s nothing like a play to make you forget your troubles for a few hours. In my experience, even a mediocre play can transport you. And show tunes are the best soundtrack for tough times. You think you’re sad? Let’s hear what Fantine from Les Misérables has to say about that!

By far my favorite New York City performance was way off Broadway: Charlotte’s dance recital. It’s enchanting to watch a bunch of squirming, giggling two-year-olds trying to dance in unison. Some are intensely focused (that would be my granddaughter), some are trying to talk to their parents in the audience, and one girl just sat down and took off her shoes in the middle of everything. It was lovely mayhem. As I watched Charlotte and her friends laugh and fall down and get up again, I felt a twinge of something I couldn’t quite place. Then I realized what it was: relief. I had been ready to completely devote the next four or eight years to serving my country. But that would have come with a cost. I would have missed a lot of dance recitals and bedtime stories and trips to the playground. Now I had those back. That’s more than a silver lining. That’s the mother lode.

Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife , Madam Secretary , Blue Bloods , and NCIS: Los Angeles , which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey . That show always reminds me of the night I spent in Buckingham Palace in 2011 during President Obama’s state visit, in a room just down the hall from the balcony where the Queen waves to the crowds. It was like stepping into a fairy tale.

On the Saturday after the election, I turned on Saturday Night Live and watched Kate McKinnon open the show with her impression of me one more time. She sat at a grand piano and played “Hallelujah,” the hauntingly beautiful song by Leonard Cohen, who had died a few days before. As she sang, it seemed like she was fighting back tears. Listening, so was I.

At the end, Kate-as-Hillary turned to the camera and said, “I’m not giving up and neither should you.”

I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing. Novelist Anne Lamott once wrote that the three essential prayers she knows are “Help,” “Thanks,” “Wow.” You can guess which one I reached for last fall. I prayed for help to put the sadness and disappointment of my defeat behind me; to stay hopeful and openhearted rather than becoming cynical and bitter; and to find a new purpose and start a new chapter, so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations , rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.

I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

I also prayed for wisdom. I had help from Bill Shillady, the United Methodist minister who co-officiated at Chelsea and Marc’s marriage and led the memorial services for my mother. During the campaign, he sent me devotionals every day, which are now collected in his book Strong for a Moment Like This . On November 9, he sent me a commentary that originally appeared in a blog by Pastor Matt Deuel. I read it many times before the week was out. This passage in particular really moved me:

It is Friday, but Sunday is coming.

This is not the devotional I had hoped to write. This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day.

While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays.

For the disciples and Christ’s followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost. And even though Jesus told his followers that three days later the temple would be restored … they betrayed, denied, mourned, fled, and hid. They did just about everything but feel good about Friday and their circumstances.

You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming! Death will be shattered. Hope will be restored. But first, we must live through the darkness and seeming hopelessness of Friday.

I called Reverend Bill, and we talked for a long time.

I reread one of my favorite books, The Return of the Prodigal Son by the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen. It’s something I’ve gone back to repeatedly during difficult times in my life. You may know the parable about the younger of two sons who strays and sins but finally comes home. He’s welcomed lovingly by his father but resented by his older brother, who had stayed behind and served his father honorably while the younger brother did whatever he wanted. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest in our family and something of a Girl Scout, but I’ve always identified with the older brother in the parable. How grating it must have been to see his wayward sibling welcomed back as if nothing had happened. It must have felt as if all his years of hard work and dutiful care meant nothing at all. But the father says to the older brother, “Have I not taken good care of you? Have you not been close to me? Have you not been at my side learning and working?” Those things are their own reward.