NEW YORK - 1884 In February, 25-year old Theodore Roosevelt experienced a cataclysmic event. On that fated Valentine’s day, his mother Martha died of typhoid fever. 11 hours later, his wife passed away from kidney disease (the result of a complicated childbirth just two days earlier).
In his journal, the only thing Roosevelt scrawled on the thick paper was a large black X and the sentence “The light has gone out of my life.”
When I first learned of this, I wondered how someone could ever recover from such incredible loss. Roosevelt was prolific.
In my search and readings, Medora came up. In a bid to transmute his pain, Roosevelt went to the Badlands of Dakota.
rough notes because this post is still a draft:
stray thoughts - sometimes I need some time, all alone, sometimes you need some time on your own, november rain etc etc.
the isolation, the return to physicality, the solitude, the lack of other output as he had in the time before. what does it say about the nature of how some of us deal with grief?