Barbara Bush, who died Tuesday, said she didn't fear death. That may be because the 92-year-old former first lady faced it before, in the hardest way imaginable.
In 1953, soon after George H.W. Bush had moved his family to Midland, Texas, to get into the oil business, the couple's 3-year-old daughter complained about feeling tired. Usually, Pauline Robinson "Robin" Bush, the much-doted-on only girl of the Bush kids, was as rowdy and healthy as her older brother George W. and baby brother Jeb. Barbara decided to take her to a pediatrician.
"Her advice was to tell no one, go home, forget that Robin was sick, make her as comfortable as we could, love her - and let her gently slip away," Bush wrote in her 1994 memoir. "She said this would happen very quickly."
But the Bushes had means and determination, and they fought the death-sentence diagnosis, beginning a months-long ordeal that would have lifelong impacts on a family that would come to include two presidents.
The day after getting the bad news, the Bushes flew with Robin to New York, moving into the apartment of George H.W. Bush's grandparents on Manhattan's East Side. His uncle was a doctor at Sloan Kettering, a leading cancer center even when cancer was barely understood and nearly taboo to mention.
In October, Robin died with her parents in the room. "For one last time I combed her hair and held our precious little girl," Barbara wrote.
Back in Texas, George W. Bush has recounted the day his returning parents came to pick him up at school in their big green Oldsmobile. He recalled his delight at the prospect of seeing his baby sister.
Barbara Bush described the death of her daughter and the grief that followed as an agony made more bearable by her relationship with her husband. Later, she would marvel that the tragedy that splits many couples had brought them closer.
George W. has said Robin's death forged a bond with his mother that he leaned on through his father's presidency and then his own. Each felt responsible for shoring up the other.
In a Post profile about that mother-son relationship in 1999, Barbara Bush described the moment she realized young George was bucking her up.
One day . . . she heard her son tell a friend that he couldn't come out because he had to play with his mother, who was lonely. "I was thinking, 'Well, I'm being there for him,' " she recalled. "But the truth was he was being there for me."
"That started my cure," she wrote in her memoir. "I realized I was too much of a burden for a little 7-year-old boy to carry."
The Bushes had three more children, including another girl, Dorothy. The family rose from mere prominence to true dynasty, with portraits hanging on official walls in Washington, Texas and Florida. George H.W. and George W. were the first father-and-son presidents since John and John Quincy Adams.
But one portrait remained on more private walls.
"It hangs within clear view of her chair," Page said of the rendering of Robin that kept Barbara company in the Bush's Houston living room.
After the George H.W. Bush Library was established in College Station, Texas, the family had Robin's body moved to a small, gated burial plot on the grounds.
Now Barbara Bush will join her daughter there.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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