Love Is A Liquid
"Love is like liquid; when it pours out, it seeps into others' lives."
- Kate O'Neill
12:55 a.m. and I'm looking at photos of Winthrop Rutherfurd. Google calls him a socialite. Imagine. Well, he's not socializing any longer; he died in 1944. As a young man he was on the Princeton rowing team and looked very sturdy and stiff jawed. Win had quite the secret romance with the beautiful Consuela Vanderbilt (of "those" Vanderbilts), but Consuela's mother, Alva, wanted her to marry Charles Spencer-Churchill, a British duke. Alva told Consuela that she'd be responsible for her mother dying of a heart attack if she didn't marry Charles, so Consuela broke it off with Winthrop and married the duke. Goodness. That's some mighty motherly interference. Winthrop, sad and cast aside, stayed single for a very long time, carousing with married socialites, until he eventually married the much younger Lucy Mercer.
Lucy had been Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary and the secret and forever lover of Franklin Roosevelt. When Eleanor found out about the affair, she offered to give FDR a divorce. He thought about it. He really did. But his mother talked him out of it, saying that it would be bad for his political future. Instead, he promised Eleanor that the affair was over, and he'd be a better husband. Of course, he kept writing to Lucy in secret and even though no one knew it at the time, she was at his bedside when he died. I think that tells us so much more about Eleanor than it does anyone else. She made way for love. For whatever reason, she made way for love. It's interesting to speculate why.
My mother told me that when my father was very ill, dying really, he would sometimes say a woman's name in his sleep or, perhaps in his delirium. It wasn't a name my mother recognized but she always wondered if it was someone my father had loved, and maybe still did love. Very little is as uncomplicated as it may seem, even in death.
- Kate O'Neill
12:55 a.m. and I'm looking at photos of Winthrop Rutherfurd. Google calls him a socialite. Imagine. Well, he's not socializing any longer; he died in 1944. As a young man he was on the Princeton rowing team and looked very sturdy and stiff jawed. Win had quite the secret romance with the beautiful Consuela Vanderbilt (of "those" Vanderbilts), but Consuela's mother, Alva, wanted her to marry Charles Spencer-Churchill, a British duke. Alva told Consuela that she'd be responsible for her mother dying of a heart attack if she didn't marry Charles, so Consuela broke it off with Winthrop and married the duke. Goodness. That's some mighty motherly interference. Winthrop, sad and cast aside, stayed single for a very long time, carousing with married socialites, until he eventually married the much younger Lucy Mercer.
Lucy had been Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary and the secret and forever lover of Franklin Roosevelt. When Eleanor found out about the affair, she offered to give FDR a divorce. He thought about it. He really did. But his mother talked him out of it, saying that it would be bad for his political future. Instead, he promised Eleanor that the affair was over, and he'd be a better husband. Of course, he kept writing to Lucy in secret and even though no one knew it at the time, she was at his bedside when he died. I think that tells us so much more about Eleanor than it does anyone else. She made way for love. For whatever reason, she made way for love. It's interesting to speculate why.
My mother told me that when my father was very ill, dying really, he would sometimes say a woman's name in his sleep or, perhaps in his delirium. It wasn't a name my mother recognized but she always wondered if it was someone my father had loved, and maybe still did love. Very little is as uncomplicated as it may seem, even in death.