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.The suddenness of his death reminded her again of the uncertainty of life and the necessity of doing all the good that she could while she still had time, but, while her charitable endeavours and commitment to her other children in no way diminished, in losing little Frittie, she lost much of her former drive and energy.Seeking comfort, she abandoned her spiritual seeking to return to the security of her childhood faith, resigning herself to ‘God’s will’ without question, and relying on the hope that one day she would see both Frittie and her father again.Her family was delighted by this ‘return to the fold’ but, with hindsight, her resignation appears to have sprung from deflation and the lack of energy to continue her quest for the truth, rather than from the realisation that her former efforts had been mistaken.Quite simply, she no longer had the will or the strength to go on searching.Ironically, at the same time, she, who had been so keen to shake her mother out of her excessive mourning, now mirrored the very attitude which she had once criticised.“You understand,” she told the Queen, “how long and deep my grief must be,” she wrote.“And does not one grow to love one’s grief, as having become part of the being one loved – as if through this one could still pay a tribute of love to them, to make up for the terrible loss, and missing of not being able to do anything for the beloved anymore?”[180]Repeatedly in her mind she relived the last day of Frittie’s life, torturing herself with thoughts of ‘what might have been’.His birthday and the anniversary of his death were commemorated each year, and, in an exact replication of her mother’s response to the death of the Duchess of Kent and Prince Albert, Alice now found every joyful occasion clouded by his absence.Even though she delighted in the birth of her youngest child, May, her christening at Jugenheim served only as a reminder that Frittie was no longer with them.In the same way, too, as her mother had declared that earthly life held no meaning for her in the aftermath of Prince Albert’s passing, eighteen months after Frittie’s death, Alice wrote mournfully that ‘much that was dearest, most precious…is in the grave; part of my heart is there, too.’In a state of deepening depression, she had little inclination to make new friends, commenting that they could never replace old ones who were ‘precious landmarks in the history of one’s life’[v]; and suddenly events and places which had brought her pleasure in the past, no longer seemed so attractive.Three years earlier the ‘heavenly’ sea air, the long beach and the donkey rides at Blankenberghe had been sheer delight but now, as finances prevented the family from holidaying elsewhere, she wrote mournfully that they would have to make do with ‘that dreadful Blankenberghe – without tree or bush, nothing but a beach and sand banks’.Music, which had long been her solace, became too painful, and it was weeks after Frittie’s death before she could bring herself to play the piano again.Even thoughts of Osborne, which had for so long been a haven for her and to which she would ever long to return, were shaded by the realisation that her childhood companions were no longer there, and even if the place remained the same, she could never relive the happy days of the past.Throughout her life, Alice had struggled to overcome her tendency to be over-emotional but now the effort was too great.“People with strong feelings and of a nervous temperament, for which one is no more responsible than the colour of one’s eyes, have things to fight against and to put up with, unknown to those of quiet equable dispositions, who are free from violent emotions and have consequently no feeling of nerves – still less of irritable nerves….One can overcome a great deal but alter oneself one cannot.”[181]Disappointed by her marriage, disillusioned by her spiritual seeking, and tired of struggling against her own nature, it was as though Frittie’s death had led to a dam burst of all the feelings she had struggled so hard to overcome.The unspoken anguish she felt at the death of her father; the loneliness of realising that she and Louis were incompatible; the stress of financial struggles; and the strain of living through two wars – all were taking their toll, and, just as Prince Albert’s repressed emotions had resulted in a myriad of apparently disconnected ailments, so, too, was Alice increasingly afflicted by various debilitating illnesses from which she would never fully recover.Chapter 20 – How Far From Well I AmPartial to puddings and pies, Queen Victoria’s girth increased with age to the point where the waist of her drawers measured more than fifty inches[w].At least three of her children shared her propensity to obesity, so it is unsurprising that Alice, who was slim, was frequently described as ‘very thin’.This, combined with the Queen’s regular references to Alice’s health, has given the impression that there was a certain frailty about her, which has often been linked to her childhood episode of scarlet fever.It must be remembered, though, that it was common practice for members of the Royal Family to comment on one another’s appearance and, while for the Queen ‘health’ was often a euphemism for pregnancy, each minor ailment or the pallor of the skin was noted in letters and journals.Years later, Alice’s daughter, Alix, recorded her children’s temperatures and even the dates of her daughters’ periods in letters to her husband, the Tsar.Alice herself informed the Queen of every childhood illness her children suffered – Ella had a ‘violent cough’; Victoria had a cold; Ernie was pale; Irène had chicken pox – and she wrote often of the necessity of taking them to the seaside for its restorative effects.This apparent obsession with health, which seems to verge on hypochondria, could well be explained by the fact that this was an age in which letter-writing was the sole means of communication, and consequently letters contained all kinds of minute details of everyday life.Moreover, Queen Victoria – herself a prolific letter-writer and avid reader of novels – expected to be kept informed of every incidental detail of her children’s experience.Far from viewing herself as frail, Alice considered herself to be particularly robust, and, apart from the ‘typical family complaints’ of rheumatism and colds – which were common at a time when central heating was unheard of, and the damp English climate was compounded by the smog of industrial cities – she commented that being ill was a nuisance since she was so unused to it.She had no misgivings about visiting disease-infected hospitals or having close contact with smallpox and typhus victims, and, until Frittie’s death, she never felt so weak as to neglect her duties.Nonetheless, throughout her married life, Alice had suffered from a number of symptoms which might be considered psychosomatic.In February 1868, while worrying about her brother, Leopold, who had been suffering from a serious haemorrhage, she was afflicted with such agonising neuralgia that she could barely open her eyes for over week.“I have never felt so unwell, or suffered so much,” she told the Queen, before going on to describe the intensity of the pain that affected one side of her head, leaving her so weak that she could not stand without fearing she would faint.Trigeminal neuralgia, the symptoms of which, as Alice described, closely resemble those of migraine, is a recurrent condition caused by the compression or inflammation of the trigeminal nerve
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