Libby certainly didn’t cope. She seesawed between living with her mother and living with her father as a young adult, developing what might have been anorexia （“it seemed as though she would soon waste away and die,”43 wrote her father of his “greatly emaciated”44 child）。 Eventually, she became so sick that Elizabeth entirely stopped her reform work for three years to care for Libby full time. She seemingly recovered, later joining Elizabeth on the road as a partner in her book business, and in 1880, she married an Irishman named Henry Gordon. By the 1890s, however, she’d relapsed; her husband committed her to an asylum in California, and they divorced.
As soon as Elizabeth discovered what had happened, she rushed to California and rescued Libby from the hospital. The two women moved in with Toffy’s family on the West Coast, with Elizabeth determined to do all she could to nurse her daughter.
But Libby was by no means an unafflicted woman like her mother had been. She was genuinely ill. Yet Elizabeth felt that was all the more reason to keep her at home and to love and care for her personally. After all the horrors she’d seen in the asylum, she would never let her daughter suffer that fate. So what if Libby was noisy and woke Elizabeth in the night? So what if she was quiet and would go days without speaking? Elizabeth was by her side through it all. And when Libby’s actions needed at least some kind of control, her mother still made that as humane as she could. She and Libby lived downstairs in the front room of Toffy’s house, and Toffy stretched some webbed wire from wall to wall to divide the space so that when she needed to be, Libby could be locked in. But Elizabeth would still sleep in the same room, next to that wall of wire, so she could be there if Libby called to her. Toffy’s daughter was often embarrassed because her grandma was always taking Libby outside on frequent walks; the neighbors soon became aware Libby was mad. But Elizabeth seemingly felt no shame at all, proudly walking by her daughter’s side as they took the air.
But no matter how much mothers might wish it, they can never live forever, even for their children. Ultimately, despite all Elizabeth’s efforts, Libby ended her days in an asylum, passing away at the age of fifty-one.
Theophilus, predictably, blamed Elizabeth for their daughter’s breakdown, attributing it to Elizabeth’s “wrong treatment”45 in Chicago. Of his own role, he said nothing, except for one curious line in his diary toward the end of his life: “I acknowledge the Justice of God in this great calamity [his wife’s “insanity” and all its consequences] & hope that he in mercy is overruling it for my spiritual welfare.”46
Did he mean his own actions needed “overruling”？ Was there something he’d done that God should forgive?
But most likely he simply feared his wife’s “irreligious influence”47 might be held against him on the Day of Judgment. It perhaps suggested another motive for why he’d always pursued her so relentlessly: not for his children but because he’d wanted to save his own soul.
Elizabeth certainly felt he never showed an ounce of guilt or regret. She described him to her readers in her later books thus: “His health is poor, and his declining years are mostly spent in the solitude of his lonely room, with but little of the solace of love and human sympathy to cheer his approach to his more lonely tomb.”48
Ironically, in contrast to Elizabeth’s broad world, which now stretched from coast to coast, Theophilus’s horizons in his later years reduced down to the four walls of the room he occupied in his sister Sybil’s house, in an echo of how he had once reduced Elizabeth’s world to the four walls of her asylum cell. But in that small room, far from society’s intrusions, Theophilus read his books and prayed his prayers and led a quiet life. One could argue that perhaps that was what he had always wanted. He’d never had his wife’s curiosity or passion. Maybe in the end, they both became happy in their separate spheres.
As the year 1870 drew to a close, Theophilus wrote in his diary, “The infirmities of old age are now pressing more heavily upon me… [Death] is not far off.”49
It was a gloomy prediction, typical of the gloomy man. In fact, he lived another fifteen years. But in December 1885, he passed away at Sybil’s house aged eighty-three.
Six years later, in a private asylum on the outskirts of Jacksonville, a determined doctor paced the corridors of his own creation. Yet McFarland’s strides were no longer as smooth and straight as they had once been; he now walked with difficulty, a symptom of a brain inflammation that was only getting worse. Nevertheless, on that morning of November 22, 1891, he was said to be “quite cheerful.”50