Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt - Death

Death

Alice Roosevelt gave birth to Alice, a healthy baby girl at eight-thirty, the night of February 12, 1884. Theodore was in Albany attending business on the Assembly floor, because he was positive that the baby would be born on Valentines Day, the four-year anniversary of their engagement. He received a telegram the next morning notifying him of the birth, and made arrangements to take leave from his duties that afternoon. When he later received another telegram that Alice had taken ill, the commute was such that he did not arrive to his home until midnight, by which time Alice was in a semi-comatose state. He held her for two hours until alerted to his mother's deteriorating condition, two floors below in the Roosevelt's Manhattan home. (Forty nine year-old, Martha "Mittie" Bulloch Roosevelt had been ill for several days with what would later be determined to be typhoid fever). His mother died an hour later. Theodore then rushed upstairs to his wife, whom he held for several hours until she died on the afternoon of the 14th from undiagnosed Bright's disease, and childbirth complications (at least one modern medical specialist who has commented postulates that Alice did not have Bright's disease but instead died from toxemia of pregnancy or pre-eclampsia). It was Valentines Day, the four year anniversary of their engagement. She was 22 years old. T.R. was so distraught by Alice's death that except for a diary entry ("The light has gone out of my life") he hardly ever spoke of her again. In a short privately published tribute to Alice, Roosevelt wrote:

She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.

Richard Nixon made reference to these comments upon his resignation for the presidency in 1974. Paying tribute to Roosevelt and his inner courage, he remarked that "only when you have been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to reach the highest mountain".

While he made some oblique references to Alice in the months after her death, Roosevelt never spoke of her publicly again. He refused to have her name mentioned in his presence. When asked about her mother by Alice's daughter and namesake, she was referred to Roosevelt's sister, Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt for information and learned details of her mother only from her aunt. So final was this decision to try to put Alice's loss out of his life, that she is not even mentioned by name in his autobiography.

The Roosevelts had one daughter:

• Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980). According to a number of historians, Roosevelt's need to leave behind or suppress his experiences with his first wife were a source of deep resentment by his daughter. She was unable to get him to talk about her mother in any meaningful way. Her rebellious life finds some explanation in this sad aspect of her relationship with her father. (Alice would go on to have a daughter herself, Paulina, who ironically, was born on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1925).

In the immediate aftermath of his wife's death, Theodore turned the care of their newly-born infant daughter to his elder sister Anna, also known as Bamie, and embarked on a journey of personal discovery to his ranch in the badlands of Dakota Territory. From this interlude Roosevelt would emerge a renewed man and would go on to the Presidency of the United States in 1901.