Isabella Stewart Gardner suffered perinatal mental health challenges. That terminology did not exist in the 1860’s as she dealt with complex maternal health and child loss that preceded a season in which she ‘took to her bed’. Nor was there the awareness, understanding, or support that we might hope for (and work towards) now. But this extraordinary woman did suffer postpartum depression… and more.

Over Mothers Day weekend, Isabella (the standee) and I went to Mass PPD Fund‘s event, Flourishing. Their annual “special chance to come together in community to celebrate, learn and recharge” brings together families with lived experience, practitioners, leaders, volunteers, and the community in support of better awareness and services for parents facing postpartum depression and other perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. I invited participants to “ask me why Isabella Stewart Gardner belongs here.” In response, I told her hope-filled, redemptive, history – and in the spirit of the theme, shared how this complicated Bostonian mother flourished.

I once heard postpartum depression described as a ‘reasonable response to an unreasonable season’. The spectrum of complex perinatal mood concerns is real, devastating, and treatable. Isabella and Jack Gardner suffered several miscarriages beginning in their first year of marriage. After three years, a son, Jack Junior, was born. Tragically, Jackie passed away just before his second birthday in 1865, likely of pneumonia. Then, a few months later her friend and sister-in-law died from childbirth complications just as the Gardners lost another baby. Isabella would not be pregnant again.*

Isabella retreated in her sorrow. Morris Carter, Mrs. Gardner’s first official biographer (also the first Director of her museum), described the period after Jackie’s death as “years of depression and illness.” At the suggestion of the family physician, Isabella was carried by ambulance and stretcher onboard a ship for a trip; the theory being that travel might help where nothing else had. Scandinavia and Russia, Vienna and Paris, changed something. The Gardners returned home “greatly improved” (also Carter’s words.) There is no way we know what Isabella was thinking – what affect an ocean voyage, time away with her husband, immersion in a new culture, even acquiring pretty things… had for her. What is certain is that there was a change.

flourish

1. to grow luxuriantly : thrive
2.  prosper
   • a: to achieve success
   • b: to be in a state of activity or production
   • c: to reach a height of development or influence
3. to make confident, bold and sweeping gestures meant to be noticed

– based on Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Without a doubt, the Stewarts’ money and privilege allowed for an immense level of resource. Extravagant world travel and art collecting are out of reach to most of us. Her personality, too, had always been over the top. Isabella was flamboyant; be it wearing her long string of pearls (on her neck or around her tiny waist), borrowing a lion from the zoo, or building a palace as a single woman at the turn of the Twentieth Century. She was not only an overcomer, but did so with flair. Her scrapbook collection, filled with articles about herself, testifies to that love of the limelight.

But Isabella was also intensely private. She never spoke publicly about her griefs and she burned her personal papers. It is impossible to know the full extent of her feelings and thoughts except to interpret her choices and the clues she left in her life’s work. In short, Mrs. Gardner curated her image as carefully as she did her museum.

Mrs. Gardner’s lifelong travel and collecting, and ultimately her legacy – establishing a museum for the “education and enjoyment of the public forever” are exemplary of her whole complex and paradoxical self. Her accomplishments are as exceptional as her challenges and griefs. She was a seeker of beauty, generous in the face of devastation, and triumphant as a mother changing her world… with flair. Like many who gathered at the Flourishing event, Isabella Stewart Gardner was a Mass mom working to survive and thrive, and even flourish.

*Though Jack and Isabella Gardner adopted their three orphaned nephews ten years later.