This section served up a whole bunch of things that broke my heart into tiny pieces, and I guess I might as well just lay them out for y’all so you can be heartbroken too.

Feeling poorly, Kent retired early to bed. Anxious about his guest, Hamilton tiptoed into his room with an extra blanket and draped it over him delicately. “Sleep warm, little judge, and get well,” Hamilton told him. “What should we do if anything should happen to you?”

I don’t know if I’ve told y’all this, but nothing wins my heart like people putting blankets on other people to make sure they aren’t cold.

In the lead-up to the duel, Hamilton’s son James asks his father to look over a speech he’s writing, and this is what Hamilton tells him:

“My dear James,” Hamilton began, “I have prepared for you a thesis on discretion. You may need it. God Bless you. Your affectionate father, A.H.”

And finally, I wrote “heart is stabbed tho for real” in my notes when I got to this bit:

While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”

The whole scene of Alexander Hamilton’s death is really, really hard to read. You know how Alexander Hamilton could sometimes be the sweetest human man? Well, that’s what he was up to throughout the days of being on his deathbed. I kept wanting to stop reading, except stopping reading wouldn’t have stopped Alexander Hamilton from dying tragically young.

As we reach this the final day of #HamAlong, I want to give an infinitude of props both to Ron Chernow for creating this monumental biography (overpartial to its subject though it is), and particularly to Lin-Manuel Miranda for creating out of it a piece of art that gives stunning immediacy to the story of this long-dead genius and his life at a time in history that we all feel we already knew.

Thanks for Hamilton, dude. That’s a pretty fucking incredible thing you made.

And now, with thanks once again to the fabulous Alice for hosting, I will just toddle off to weep in a corner over how great Eliza was and how unfair it is that she had to live for fifty years without her beloved husband at her side. SOB.

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