American history tends to focus on the celebrated lives and tragic deaths of the U.S. presidents, especially if they met their end by an assassin's bullet , as was the case with Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. But less discussed are the ill-fated lives of the widows they left behind. In some cases, these first ladies experienced heartbreaking pain both before and after their famous husbands died.

There was the harrowing fate of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was forced into a mental institution by her son a decade after her husband's assassination. Lucretia Garfield lost two of her young children to disease before her husband James became president and was recovering from malaria when he was shot and mortally wounded. She outlived him by nearly 40 years.

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