WASHINGTON — Not too long ago, Senator-elect Jean Carnahan read a magazine article about coping with severe stress, a condition that can strike people who experience one of the following: the death of a spouse, the death of a child, the loss of a friend, a move to a new town, a job change.
"And I said, 'Oh, my heavens, all these things are happening to me,' " said Carnahan, 66, over a plate of pasta and a cup of tea in the Dirksen Building cafeteria recently. "I should have read the article more closely."
Wherever she goes in the Capitol nowadays, Carnahan is celebrated for her courage and good humor; strangers want to hug her, colleagues want to share their own misfortune. Recently Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., handed her a well-worn copy of a book by his brother John F. Kennedy, "Profiles in Courage."
Three weeks before the election, Carnahan's high school sweetheart, confidant and husband of 45 years, Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri, died in a plane crash. Her oldest son, Randy, who was flying the plane, died with him, as did an aide to the governor, Chris Sifford.
Mel Carnahan, a Democrat, was challenging John Ashcroft, the Republican incumbent, for his Senate seat in a hard-fought, often bitter race.
But Jean Carnahan had little time to absorb the shock. Just days after she buried her husband and son, Carnahan received a call from the state's new governor, Roger Wilson, who posed a series of hypothetical questions: Let's say her husband was elected posthumously, would she be willing to fill the seat?
"I had to think long and hard about it," Carnahan said. "I knew it would be quite a dramatic step for me. And I didn't know whether the people of Missouri would go to the polls and vote for someone who was dead. There was no one there saying you ought to do this. In fact, people stayed away from that.
"I almost felt as if my world had come to an end," she added. "But I didn't want all the things that Mel stood for, that we had worked together for for 17 years, I didn't want those things to die. I didn't want to feel like I was letting myself down or him down. And the people of Missouri wanted something to survive that plane crash."
Jean Carnahan, a "Jimmy Carter Baptist," as she put it, prayed and consulted with her children. One pivotal moment, she said, came during an interview with Cokie Roberts, when Roberts recounted how her own mother, Lindy Boggs, coped with the loss of her husband, Hale, who died in a plane crash in 1972.
Still reeling from the loss of her husband, Boggs decided to fill her husband's congressional seat. This new-found sense of purpose in her mother's life, Roberts said, guided her through her grief.
"I decided I would just go with my heart and soul and do what I knew he would want me to do," Carnahan said.
With her sweetness and sharp pantsuits, Carnahan is the picture of the modern grandmother, a widow with guts. But she knows she must flesh out the portrait if she is to be taken seriously, and be re-elected.
Her presence as a Democrat in a seat formerly held by a Republican is critical to her party in the evenly divided Senate. But she has already met with centrist senators like Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana and Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and says she plans to work in the middle, listening, and focusing first on education.
Born in Washington on Dec. 20, 1933, Carnahan met her future husband at a church youth group in the early 1950s. Then, thanks to every school's systematic reliance on alphabetical order, Jean Carpenter wound up sitting next to Mel Carnahan at Anacostia High School.
After promising his father he would not marry until after graduating from college, Mel Carnahan raced through George Washington University in three years. Three days after graduation the two were married, and a short while later, Jean Carnahan completed her own studies in business administration at the same university.
The couple had four children, who all became lawyers — "not a brain surgeon among them," Carnahan lamented. As a young wife, Carnahan jumped wholeheartedly into political life and served as her husband's trusted adviser. She always wrote her own speeches, and sometimes wrote his.
Much of what happened before the election Carnahan calls a blur. "I guess I didn't dare let myself think that it was possible," she said. "We were asking the people of Missouri to do an awful lot. But I guess I kind of got a feeling that something was happening out there."
She first noticed that "something" on the day of her husband's burial, when she set out from Jefferson City to the family farm in Rolla. Someone whispered to her to hurry up.
"I said, What are you talking about?" she recalled. "He said people are waiting all along the way. Sure enough, as we started, each town we went through — there are about four or five towns along the way, and it was dusk — people were standing there with candles and posters, and they were singing.
"It was just a very moving and solemn time," she added. "So I could tell this had affected people in a very deep way."
On election night, Carnahan, surrounded by her children and a few of her husband's former aides, flipped on the television set, for the first time since her husband's death, to watch the returns.
Her husband had been trailing Ashcroft all evening, and Carnahan said she was going to bed. But several people urged her to stay, since the vote tally from St. Louis was still out. She sat back down.
"At 12:45 it was officially declared," Carnahan said. "My daughter turned and put her hand on my leg and said, 'We've won.' And my son came over, and we just hugged each other and cried."