Other Fan Fiction ❯ Rosemary Kennedy ❯ Rosemary Kennedy ( One-Shot )

Rosemary Kennedy

 

By Laura S. Hagerstrom

Her real name was Rose Marie Kennedy, yet she was called `Rosemary'. She was nicknamed as `Rosie' by family and close friends. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. She was the eldest female of her 11 brothers and sisters. She was born a year after J.F. Kennedy (who was our president until his murder), on September 13th 1918. She was considered slightly retarded because of her hard birth.

 

She had a childhood full of bright memories. She was considered to be shy and demur by some but very vivacious at the same time. She had attended the usual social events of her time. She described many of the occasions in her diaries in the 1930's and which were published in the 1980's. They reveal a happy, unsophisticated young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interest for a young woman.

 

As she grew older, she searched approval in her daily tasks from her family. She practiced every detail in etiquette and her other social needs. She hated to be reproved or to be shown any signal of disapproval. She didn't like to do things wrong because she also disapproved of herself more often than not. She showed anger and frustration at random moments even though she tried to keep it in herself. Yet her mood swings grew even stronger as every year passed.

 

In her late teen hood she and her younger sister were taken to England with her father who was Ambassador to the US in England. Her father was invited to meet the royal family with his own family. As they exited the event Rosemary accidentally tripped while having done everything else perfectly. Rosemary was frustrated about this embarrassing moment and also hated to be reproved by her father who also had disapproved of what happened.

 

 

Rosemary was placid and easygoing as a child and a teenager. On the contrary, the maturing Rosemary became asserted within her personality. She started having more violent mood swings and behavior in general, which started worry her parents. Those who observed from a different point of view or from the outside would associate these mood swings with the fact that she couldn't keep up with her other sibling successes, that made he feel like an outsider in her own family, and also associated it with the hormonal growth that related to sexual maturation going on within her body at the time.

 

The family was soon having trouble dealing with the now stormy and unexplainably violent Rosemary. At the time she had started sneaking out at night from the convent where she was being educated and where she was being cared for. This caused an uproar within her family, outraged her father mainly, and could have been viewed as inappropriate at the time by those outside the family ring. Thus her sneaking out would have brought a probable disgrace to her political family.

 

In 1941, when Rosemary was 23 years old, Joseph Kennedy (her father) had heard that lobotomy was an option to `cure' his daughter of her mood swings that ailed her at the time that made her difficult to handle at home. Rosemary's father had Doctor Walter Freeman perform the Lobotomy with his partner in St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington DC. Back then the surgery was still in it's infancy, meaning not many doctors knew the procedure well. Freeman and his partner had performed only 65 lobotomies in total.

 

But the lobotomy was failure; it reduced to the mentality of a child. She would be incontinent and staring blankly at the walls for hours at a time. Her speech was now an unintelligible vocabulary. Her mother was devastated because now Rosemary was incapable of doing anything alone, even if Rosemary's' violent behavior subsided after the lobotomy. Her mother considered this the first of the Kennedy tragedies.

 

In 1949, Rosemary was taken to St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children. It is residential institution for those who have mental disabilities. Since then, Rosemary was greatly detached from the most part of her family. Her younger sister, Eunice Kennedy, who founded the Special Olympics and also was a voice on the behalf of Rosemary, visited her regularly. Joe Kennedy, her brother, made donations to philanthropic agencies that he founded to help people with disabilities that could improve their problems. She was on occasions she was taken to visit relatives in Washington DC or Florida. Rosemary was even taken to her childhood home, in Cape Cod.

 

Publicly she was widely declared mentally handicapped or as we can say retarded. In a political family, that was more acceptable to say than to say that she had a failed lobotomy. Only the doctors of the family, the FBI and the family itself knew what really had happened to Rosemary, due to a background check on Joe Kennedy. Yet Joe's attorney said she had a `mental illness'.

 

Rosemary Kennedy died a natural death on January 7th, 2005 at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin when she was 86 years old. Her surviving family was at her funeral. She was the fifth of the Kennedy children to die, yet the only one so far to have died of natural causes. She is buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy