Later Years and Death
After her son Jack became President in 1961, Rose "became a sort of quiet celebrity," appearing on the International Best Dressed List. Most of her social activities consisted of involvement in charities and women’s groups. Rose also took brisk ocean swims outside her Cape Cod house in fifty-degree weather.
After suffering a stroke in 1984, Rose used a wheelchair for the remainder of her life. She maintained her residence at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts and was cared for by private nurses and staff. On January 22, 1995, she died from complications from pneumonia at the age of 104, having outlived her husband by a quarter of a century, four of her nine children (Joe, Jr., Jack, Kick, and Bobby), her ex-son-in-law Peter Lawford, her son-in-law Stephen Edward Smith, her daughter-in-law Jackie, and three of her grandchildren, David, Arabella, and Patrick.
Jean became the last surviving child after Ted died.
Read more about this topic: Rose Kennedy
Famous quotes containing the words years and/or death:
“What will our children remember of us, ten, fifteen years from now? The mobile we bought or didn’t buy? Or the tone in our voices, the look in our eyes, the enthusiasm for life—and for them—that we felt? They, and we, will remember the spirit of things, not the letter. Those memories will go so deep that no one could measure it, capture it, bronze it, or put it in a scrapbook.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)