Special Olympics, by the 1990s, was a global organization that had evolved far beyond the original Timberlawn camp. Tim Shriver, Eunice’s son and Rosemary’s nephew, had become deeply involved in the organization’s leadership. Anthony Shriver had founded Best Buddies International in 1989, another organization working on inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities. The Kennedy family’s engagement with disability advocacy had become, across generations, a real institutional presence in American life.
Rosemary’s connection to all of this was indirect and largely symbolic. She did not attend Special Olympics events in any public capacity. She did not give interviews. She did not speak to the media. Her life remained what it had been for decades — centered at Saint Coletta, attended by the Sisters who cared for her, punctuated by family visits.
In the early 2000s, Rosemary Kennedy was in her early to mid-eighties. By the standards of that age, she was in what her family and caregivers described as reasonably good health, though decades of limited mobility and the effects of the original surgery had shaped what her body was capable of. She lived at Saint Coletta, in the Kennedy cottage, attended by the Sisters of Saint Francis, more than half a century after she had arrived there.
Death in Wisconsin
On January 7, 2005, Rosemary Kennedy died at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, of natural causes. She was eighty-six years old.
Her sisters Jean, Eunice, and Patricia, and her brother Ted, were with her at the time of her death. They had traveled to Wisconsin to be with her. The four siblings sat with their sister as she died in a hospital sixty miles from Saint Coletta, where she had lived since 1949.