After Teddy’s announcement, Flora spent several nights at Sagamore. That fall, she confided to Quentin’s sister Ethel that “Everything just hurts nearly all of the whole time. There is no one I can talk to who half understands. It is all so lonely.” Her parents knew that she suffered. Yet in the hundreds of condolence letters to Flora from friends and family and other correspondence from this time, there are none between Flora and her parents that mention Quentin or his family. Despite this, one of the more poignant bronzes her mother made at this time is of Flora, seated quietly in an armchair, the curve of her body and downcast expression manifesting her pensive mood.
Flora and Teddy took solace in each other’s company. Teddy wrote to Flora that fall reminding her that “for as long as I live, I shall love you as if you were my own daughter.” During that time, Flora did some work for Teddy, who she called “the Colonel,” taking dictation and typing letters and other documents. In January 1919, Roosevelt died of an embolism. His death plunged Flora further into grief.
After that, Flora lived for a time with Quentin’s half-sister, the fiercely independent Alice Roosevelt Longworth, in Washington, DC, volunteering at the Women’s Republican Committee in the office of former congressman Ruth McCormick. In the summer of 1919, Flora’s parents urged her to go to France with her aunt, Dorothy Whitney, who had lost her husband Willard Straight in the influenza pandemic.
There the women visited Chaméry, where Quentin was buried. Flora’s grief came flooding back. Paris, though, lit up with post-war joie de vivre, was the perfect antidote. The women shopped on the rue de la Paix, heard Tosca at the Tuileries, and walked in the Bois. The days flew by until they sailed home from Southampton a month later. Flora felt a brimming lightness, her sprightly grin restored, a new swing in her step. Theodore Roosevelt was onto something when he wrote to his daughter-in-law Belle the summer before that “there is nothing to comfort Flora at the moment, but she is young. I most earnestly hope that time will be merciful to her and, in a few years, she will keep Quentin as only a memory of her golden youth…and that she will find happiness with another good and fine man.”
Our American Cemetery guide escorts us along a sea of marble headstones to Quentin’s grave. He is buried next to his oldest brother, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who died of a heart attack in France at the end of World War II. Quentin is the only World War I pilot interred there, his remains moved in 1955 at the request of his family. Once we reach the grave, our guide attends to the noble task performed by volunteers for visiting family members and every year on the anniversary of D-Day. With a sponge, she rubs Omaha Beach sand over and into the incised letters on Quentin’s headstone. She carefully wipes off all but the sand impressed into the channels of his name, rank, unit, home state, and date of death, highlighting them. As a gentle fog rolls in from the Channel, bathing the cemetery in a soft haze, she plants two flags—one American, one French—on either side of the grave.
The American Cemetery’s unsettling serenity reminds one that freedom comes with responsibility and at a tremendous cost. Appalled by the barbarity of battle evoked in the sites I visited around Normandy’s beaches, I left awed at the courage of Quentin and Flora, and all those caught up in the war’s unpredictable forces.
