Mid-March represents the remembrance of heartbreak at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

• March 15, 1865 – John (Jackie) Lowell Gardner 3rd, only child of Jack Lowell and Isabella Stewart Gardner, dies of Lung Fever Pleurisy (likely, pneumonia) at 21 months old

ISG, ever private in her grief, spent the anniversary of Jackie’s death alone. In later years, after it was built, she prayed in the Spanish Chapel. There are stories that the Christ Child in Zurburan’s prominent The Virgin of Mercy, an early acquisition in 1888, resembled her beloved toddler. This Spanish painting portrays the Holy Mother and Son offering a blessing above a garden scene; a theme to which ISG could certainly relate. At her own passing, ISG’s body lay in state just outside this small Chapel (near to her Court gardens) next to, and in the position of the 15th century alabaster figure of a resting knight before being buried between her husband and son at the family tomb at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

• March 18, 1990 – Thirteen works of art were stolen from The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Despite a $10 million reward, the case remains unsolved.

That same week, 125 year after Jackie’s death, the museum was robbed. The Dutch room alone suffered the theft of five paintings: three Rembrandts, a Flinck, and a Vermeer. In compliance with the legal requirement in ISG’s will that nothing in the museum be changed after her death, the frames from which the paintings were cut are empty and in place. These specters are also a reminder of what has been lost. It is a violent tribute to a violent loss.

This year I visited the ISGM on March 17th, just between these anniversaries. I sat with memorials, explicit and faint. In both the Spanish Chapel and in Dutch Room I felt the weight of sorrow. John Pavlovitz, who writes about grief anniversaries aptly calls them, “perpetual, involuntary holidays.” While this March calendar week marks two (incomparable and crushing) losses, the truth is that loss is life-changing.

• March 17 – Saint Patrick’s Day, the Feast Day of the Patron Saint of Ireland. Evacuation Day (Massachusetts), a public commemoration of the day British troops evacuated Boston in 1776.