Teddy

I was ambling up 5th Avenue on my way home when I heard organ music in the distance.  It was so beautiful that I followed it right inside the vestibule of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.

As I climbed the stone steps it dawned on me, this was Teddy Roosevelt’s church when he lived around the corner.

In the late 1800s Fifth Avenue from the 30s clear up to 57th Street was lined with palatial homes. 

Teddy’s parents had theirs on the southwest corner of 57 and 5th where today an art gallery stands.

As I sat in a front pew listening to the organist I started thinking about Teddy.

On Valentine’s Day, 1884, both Teddy’s mother Martha and young wife Alice died. His mom from typhoid fever his wife, complications due to childbirth. She had just delivered a beautiful baby girl they named Alice, after her. She was 22.

I envisioned him sitting perhaps right where I was at the double funeral that had taken place on the same altar I was facing. Imagine losing two of the most important women in your life on the same day.

Teddy was only 25 when it happened so bereft he immediately left for South Dakota leaving baby Alice in the care of his eldest sister Anna also known as Bami. This was the period when he lived in the Badlands investing much of his father’s inheritance in fallow, farmland in an attempt to flee from his pain. 

On returning, he irrationally ordered Bami to take all pictures of Alice out of their frames because he couldn’t bear to look at them. Some say she was the love of his life, others that her passing was a blessing since she didn’t have what it took to be the wife of someone as dynamic as he; a moot point since we could never know how things might have been if she had lived.

One thing’s for certain, he loved her very, very much.

In one of my favorite books Mornings on Horseback, David McCullough tells us the length Theodore went to woo Miss Alice Hathaway Lee determined to have her for his bride.

On their first encounter Teddy wrote – ‘As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked and how pretty she greeted me.’

It was love at first sight.

His diary entry after she died reveals the depth of his affection:

She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.

                              

I bring all this up because it was probably the worse time of his life except for maybe years later when his youngest son Quentin was shot down in a plane during World War I.

It made me think how we’re designed to come through terrible things in our lives that, as it’s been quoted, “didn’t kill us but made us stronger.”

I know so many people struggling right now. A friend just lost someone dear to a mysterious blood clot. Another woman has a very sick son who may not live out the year.

I myself have been somewhat stumbling but remembering Teddy has made me feel much more hopeful.

Despite such a sudden and senseless tragedy he still managed to flourish.

Teddy remarried and sired 5 more children.  

As a soldier and leader he was a hero in the Spanish-American War.

He was elected Governor of New York in 1896 before becoming in 1900 at 42, the 26th President of The United States winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908.

To say it simply, he survived that hellish loss to live another 35 years to the fullest, pretty happily it appears.  

Our hearts though stretched and kicked miraculously mend.

I reminded myself of this as I breathed in the freshly polished mahogany gleaming before me. The sanctuary hasn’t changed much since Teddy’s day. Its simple beauty along with its humble history resonates throughout.

If only the stained glass could talk…

what a conversation we would have.

SB