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By Root 2887 0

the afternoon of Saturday, 9 February, an urgent summons arrived from New York.48 Theodore ran to catch the overnight train, knowing that his father must have suffered a relapse, yet unaware that screams of agony were echoing through the Roosevelt town house. Theodore Senior’s “peritonitis” was in reality a malignant fibrous tumor of the bowel, and since its brief period of remission over Christmas it had grown so rapidly that it was now strangling his intestines. The pain that he suffered had, in a matter of weeks, turned his dark hair gray; even now, as his elder son rushed to his bedside, it was all the other children could do to hold him down. “He was so mad with pain,” Elliott recorded, “that beyond groans and horrible writhes and twists he could do nothing. Oh my God my Father what agonies you suffered.”49

Theodore arrived on Sunday morning to find the flags of New York City flying at half-mast. “Greatheart” had died shortly before midnight.50

Alone in his room later that day, the new head of the Roosevelt family drew a thick slash down the margin of his diary for 9 February 1878 and wrote: “My dear Father. Born Sept. 23, 1831.” Here his pen wavered and stopped.

WHEN THEODORE RESUMED writing on 12 February, the words flowed tumultuously, as if to wash away his grief.

He has just been buried. I shall never forget these terrible three days; the hideous suspense of the ride on; the dull, inert sorrow, during which I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away, and the two moments of sharp, bitter agony, when I kissed the dear dead face and realized that he would never again on this earth speak to me or greet me with his loving smile, and then when I heard the sound of the first clod dropping on the coffin holding the one I loved dearest on earth. He looked so calm and sweet. I feel that if it were not for the certainty, that as he himself has so often said, “he is not dead but gone before,” I should almost perish.

None of the Roosevelts, least of all Theodore himself, could have foreseen how shattered he would be by the premature loss of his father. “He was everything to me.” For a while, it seemed as if the youth could not survive without him. Like a fledgling shoved too soon from the bough, he tumbled nakedly through the air; some of his diary entries are not so much expressions of sorrow as squawks of fright.

They give the impression of a sensitivity so extreme it verges on mental imbalance. For month after month Theodore pours a flood of anguish into his diary, although his letters remain determinedly cheerful. Only in private can he allow his despair to overflow, yet the effect is therapeutic. By the end of April he is able to note: “I am now getting over the first sharpness of grief.” With perhaps unconscious symbolism, he shaves off his whiskers, and in consequence is “endlessly chaffed by the boys.” On the first day of May, with the smell of spring in the air, he is surprised to find that his thoughts of Theodore Senior have suddenly become “pleasant” ones.51

His grief, however, was by no means over. It continued to flow well into the summer, and spasmodically through the fall. Purged of terror, it became sweetened with nostalgia. Memories of his father surfaced in the form of dreams and hallucinations of almost photographic vividness. “All through the sermon,” he wrote one Sunday, “I was thinking of Father. I could see him sitting in the corner of the pew as distinctly as if he were alive, in the same dear old attitude, with his funny little ‘warlike curl’, and his beloved face. Oh, I feel so sad when I think of the word ‘never.’ ”52

Never—it was the word he had repeated over and over again in his childhood diaries, when longing for the unrecoverable past. Inevitably, his earliest and most poignant memory floated up: “I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms for hours together, night after night, and oh, how my heart pains me when I think that I never was able to do anything for him in his last