Death
After he and his family relocated to Fort Meade in Severn, Maryland, his mother hired a sixteen-year-old servant girl who had been recovering from scarlet fever. In December 1920, shortly before Christmas, Icky caught scarlet fever from the servant. Though his mother tried desperately to save him, even calling a specialist from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, Icky died on January 2, 1921. His father then referred to this incident as "the most shattering moment of their lives, one that almost destroyed their marriage". Mamie and Dwight blamed themselves for Icky's death; had they checked the girl's background, they would have found out that the girl had scarlet fever. In his biography of Eisenhower, Stephen E. Ambrose wrote:
These feelings had to be suppressed if the marriage was to survive the disaster, but suppression did not eliminate the unwanted thoughts, only made them harder to live with. Both the inner-directed guilt and the projected feelings of blame placed a strain on their marriage. So did the equally inevitable sense of loss, the grief that could not be comforted, the feeling that all the joy had gone out of life. "For a long time, it was as if a shining light had gone out in Ike's life," Mamie said later. "Throughout all the years that followed, the memory of those bleak days was a deep inner pain that never seemed to diminish much."
Read more about this topic: Doud Eisenhower
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.”
—Walter Reisch (1903–1963)