Queen of Hawaii, she lost her only son at four, then her husband fourteen months later, without having entertained one thought that he was in danger. She spent the next twenty years building a hospital and a cathedral, and wrote for twenty-three years to Queen Victoria, who had lost her own husband the same year.
In their own words
While our hearts are melted by this deep bereavement, his father and I find comfort in the thought that the departed has gone to Heaven, to mingle with the blessed.
Letter to Queen Victoria, Palace of Honolulu, 10 September 1862, after the death of her son; manuscript, Kalanianaʻole Collection, Bishop Museum, transcribed in Rhoda E. A. Hackler, "My Dear Friend": Letters of Queen Victoria and Queen Emma, The Hawaiian Journal of History 22 (1988), p. 105
On the 30th. November my Husband, of whose danger I had never entertained one thought, expired suddenly, almost while in the act of speaking to me, and it was a long while before they could make me believe that what I saw was death and that he had really left me alone for the remainder of my life.
Letter to Queen Victoria, ʻIolani Palace, 14 February 1864; manuscript, Paul Markham Kahn Collection, transcribed in Rhoda E. A. Hackler, "My Dear Friend": Letters of Queen Victoria and Queen Emma, The Hawaiian Journal of History 22 (1988), p. 107
It is not so with me, I am desolate altogether, with nothing left but the hope of a meeting hereafter.
Letter to Queen Victoria, ʻIolani Palace, 14 February 1864; manuscript, Paul Markham Kahn Collection, transcribed in Rhoda E. A. Hackler, "My Dear Friend": Letters of Queen Victoria and Queen Emma, The Hawaiian Journal of History 22 (1988), p. 107
Is it not a very strange truth that often affliction is the only way by which the promises of our God are endeared to us? but so it is.
Letter to Queen Victoria, Honolulu, 23 January 1872, transcribed in Rhoda E. A. Hackler, "My Dear Friend": Letters of Queen Victoria and Queen Emma, The Hawaiian Journal of History 22 (1988), p. 121