Congresswoman’s Daughter Lauded for Her Spirited Response to Cancer : Tribute: Barbara Sigmund lived with style and died with amazing grace. A mountain of condolences fills Rep. Boggs’ office.

What Lindy Boggs, the gracious congresswoman from the South, remembers about Barbara Sigmund, the exuberant mayor from the North, was the profound way she touched others’ lives.

What Lindy Boggs, the mother, remembers about Barbara, her daughter, is the way she lived with such substance and style.

And the way she died with such amazing grace.

Boggs was there when Barbara died of cancer last month. She had declined to run for reelection so she could be at her daughter’s bedside.

She was a mother, after all, long before she was a politician.

Now, on a table by the window in her Capitol Hill office, stacks and stacks of letters and cards are neatly sorted and filed in folders according to origin: Washington, New Jersey, Louisiana, across the country, across the ocean. They are condolences, notices of gifts made in Barbara’s name and masses held in her memory.

“We’re beginning to have letters from people who visited her grave site. It’s amazing, the strength that they seem to gain from some contact with her. It’s truly amazing,” said Boggs, 74, sipping a demitasse. Her pale blue eyes show none of the strain of juggling her personal and professional lives, so sad and unsettled in recent weeks.

“She had a very personal way of reacting to people and interacting with people. One of the themes in some of the letters was, ‘I met her only once, but she’s influenced the rest of my life.’ ‘I met her only once, but I feel she was my friend.’ ”

They remember her as the mayor of Princeton, N.J., as the daughter of Rep. Hale Boggs, the powerful Democrat from Louisiana, and as the eldest child of Corinne Claiborne (Lindy) Boggs, who was elected to her husband’s House seat after he died in a plane crash 18 years ago.

Barbara was the little girl scampering through the halls of Congress, the young woman dancing with President Lyndon B. Johnson at her wedding, and the county official who built the model battered woman’s shelter and the playground. They remember her as tall and blond and terrific, smart and funny and self-assured. A poet. An orator. A visionary.

Barbara Sigmund’s legion of friends miss her fiercely, just as Lindy Boggs’ friends on the Hill will miss her. Her announcement in July ended 50 years in Congress, between herself and her husband. She did it for Barbara. Although she wouldn’t say so then, she will now.

“I had hoped there would be more time,” Boggs said quietly. “And I knew that if I had to run a campaign, I would not have been able to spend August recess with her. It was a critical time during her illness.”

Barbara Boggs Sigmund died at the age of 51 early on Oct. 10, surrounded by loved ones, in in her own bed in the big white house in Princeton, N. J., where she lived with her husband, Paul Sigmund.

She came to Princeton 25 years ago, but never lost her Southern drawl. Born in New Orleans at the end of the Depression, she was 15 months old when her father broke Huey Long’s political machine and got elected to Congress.

“Politics was inhaled,” Barbara Sigmund once said. She told a story her daddy used to tell--of how he hustled her over to the nearest polling place right after her christening.

She won her first contest at age 8, when she became “Little Virgin Mary” at the Sacred Heart School. “It’s been downhill electorally ever since,” joked the woman who at one time was president of both the class she attended in New Orleans during half the year and the one she attended in Washington the other half.

“She was always a leader,” her mother said, chuckling as she remembered Barbara’s comment. “She was princess, a queen, a president, a chairman.”

She studied politics at Manhattanville College, wrote letters in the Kennedy White House after graduation and later married Sigmund, now a professor of politics at Princeton.

They had three sons and she was a full-time mom for a while, but the pull of politics was irresistible. Not that Barbara resisted. “Honey, you have such a wonderful life. Why ruin it running for office?” her mother had asked. “Run!” her daddy said.

She was elected to the Princeton Borough Council in 1972, then became a Mercer County freeholder (commissioner) and the Freeholders’ first woman president and, finally, mayor of Princeton.

In 1982, as she launched what would be an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate, she learned she had cancer and would lose her left eye. Less than two hours after the surgery, she appeared at a political fund-raiser wearing a heart-shaped eye patch that matched her red silk dress. “You all are a sight for a sore eye,” she told the audience.

The eye patches, color-coordinated with her outfits, became a trademark. She handed out personalized ones during an unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic gubernatorial primary in New Jersey in 1989. Later that year, she learned that the cancer she thought was gone had spread throughout her body.

Sigmund went public with her illness. She wrote about it, spoke about it, joked about it. “Until we experience what it’s like to be up against something, we don’t realize that courage is a word of action,” she said. “You cannot wallow in loss if you want to make a gain. You just go forward and do .”

Lindy Boggs did what she had to do. She left the black-majority district that never gave her less than 60% of the vote to follow her heart.

And now? “I haven’t decided,” she admitted. “Barbara said to me, ‘Mother, you’re going to piddle around, and Jan. 3 will come, and you will have not made up you’re mind what you’re going to do.’ And she’s right.”

While the congresswoman chooses among what she calls an embarrassment of offers, she will oversee the integration of her own archives and her husband’s at Tulane University. But first she has to answer all these notes.

She sorts through them, pulling out a special one here and there. “This is a darling one,” she said. “You know what impressed me? The important men who wrote hand-written notes. A federal judge. The President.”

She fails to mention that she is handwriting replies to every one. So far, she’s done about a thousand.

“I said to her once, ‘Barbara, you have to get well. I’ve never known anybody to have so many prayers said for her.’ And she said, ‘Well, Mother, either they will help me to get well or they’ll help me to die well.’

“And that’s certainly what she did. She had a most graceful death. And in the process, touched thousands of lives.”