Death
On January 27, 1957, Paulina died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Vice President Richard Nixon was a pallbearer at her funeral. Upon Paulina's death, Alice's cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt sent a letter of condolence to Alice and the two women reconciled.
There had been what appeared to be previous suicide attempts. And despite caring about her daughter, and being a pious Catholic, the gravity of the depression that Paulina experienced was its own driver. Her friends saw Paulina as suffering "from a kind of psychic exhaustion": as one of her friends explained, ”She had gone through the motions of living, and I think it was not a pleasurable process for her."
Upon her daughter's death, Alice Roosevelt Longworth sought to raise Joanna. While things were not smooth at first (Joanna had seen how her mother would become stilted around Alice so she had not wanted to live with her initially), eventually Joanna did live with Alice and the two ended up becoming very close.
Paulina Longworth Sturm is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.
Read more about this topic: Paulina Longworth
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. Hes got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there wont be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. Thats all there is to it.”
—Clark Gable (19011960)
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Walking the sea so heavily armed;
Or does it make for death to be
Oneself a living armoury?”
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“To die, to sleep
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir totis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, theres the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)