Death after childbirth
Roosevelt gave birth to the couple's daughter at 8:30 pm on February 12, 1884; the child was named Alice Lee Roosevelt. Her husband, then a member of the New York State Assembly, was in Albany attending to business on the Assembly floor. He had been convinced their child would be born on Valentine's Day, the fourth anniversary of their engagement. After Assemblyman Roosevelt received a telegram the morning of the 13th notifying him of the birth, he made arrangements to leave that afternoon and be with his wife. Another telegram was sent and received regarding her ill health; she was in a semi-comatose state by the time he arrived home, around midnight.
Roosevelt languished for several hours while her husband held her, ultimately dying on February 14, 1884, Valentine's Day afternoon, from undiagnosed kidney failure. It was determined that her pregnancy had masked the illness. Alice Roosevelt was 22 years old at the time of her death. Her mother-in-law, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, died of typhoid on the same day in the same building.
Distraught following Alice Roosevelt's death, her husband hardly spoke of her again. Much to the frustration of their daughter, all Theodore Roosevelt revealed following his wife's death was a diary entry and a short, privately published tribute:
She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair beautiful 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.
In the immediate aftermath of his wife's death, Theodore Roosevelt turned the care of their newborn daughter, Alice Lee, over to his sister Bamie. Alice Lee learned of her mother primarily from Bamie Roosevelt and her maternal grandparents. Roosevelt never spoke to his daughter about her mother. He tore pages about his wife from his diary, and burned almost all the letters they had written to each other. Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, took custody of his daughter when she was three years old.
