Eleven-year-old Willie ... between death and rebirth, that varies in length according to a person’s conduct in life. It is the son Willie who is in the bardo, and not the father Abraham.

Willie, died of Typhoid fever in 1862. His youngest son, Tad Lincoln, died in 1871. Lincoln suffered from “melancholia,” the nineteenth-century term for clinical depression. He would enter such bouts ...

1. Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, lost three of their four children early on. Eddie died at age 3 of "chronic consumption" (likely tuberculosis), and Willie was born 10 months later.