'Merry with Her Easy Laughter'

Terry Teachout’s wife Hilary, his beloved “Mrs. T,” died tonight at the age of forty-nine. In his biography of H.L. Mencken, The Skeptic (2002), Terry quotes a passage Mencken wrote in 1936 for inclusion in a collection of stories written by his wife Sara. She had died a year earlier at the age of thirty-seven. Mencken writes:

“I find it hard, even so soon after her death, to recall her as ill. It is much easier to remember her on those days when things were going well with her, and she was full of projects, and busy with her friends and the house, and merry with her easy laughter.”