His Death, and Its Impact On His Eldest Son
He died at the age of 46 from a gastrointestinal tumor which caused him great pain for months, and prevented him from eating. Initially, he kept the extent of his illness from his oldest son, who was away attending Harvard. At the end, however, 19 year-old Theodore Jr. was informed and immediately took a train from Cambridge to New York, where he missed his father's death by a few hours. The biographer Brands has argued that the timing of his death contributed heavily to the younger Theodore's psychology, since the future president knew his father fully while growing up, but missed knowing his father man-to-man, and therefore absorbed a view of his father entirely in his role as a parent, untempered by much realization of his human imperfection.
Read more about this topic: Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
Famous quotes containing the words impact, eldest and/or son:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.”
—Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)