Eleanor Roosevelt - Death

Death

Roosevelt was injured in April 1960 when she was struck by a car in New York City. Afterwards, her health began a rapid decline. Subsequently diagnosed with aplastic anemia, she developed bone marrow tuberculosis subsequent to having been treated with cortisone which reactivated the dormant tuberculosis that she had contracted years earlier. Roosevelt died at her Manhattan home on November 7, 1962 at 6:15 p.m., at the age of 78. President Kennedy ordered the lowering of flags to half-staff in her memory. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson said, "The United States, the United Nations, the world, has lost one of its great citizens. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt is dead, and a cherished friend of all mankind is gone."

Her funeral at Hyde Park was attended by President John F. Kennedy and former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. At her memorial service, Stevenson asked, "What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many?" He further praised Roosevelt by stating, "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world." She was buried next to Franklin at the family compound in Hyde Park, New York on November 10, 1962.

Read more about this topic:  Eleanor Roosevelt

Famous quotes containing the word death:

    Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    When Gabriel’s trumpet ends all life’s delay,
    Will crash the beams of firmamental woe:
    Not nature will sustain the even crime
    Of death, though death sustains all nature, so.
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)