What is clear is that Rosemary was not a passive receiver of whatever the family chose to give her. Even after the surgery, even with her limited speech and motor function, she remained someone with responses and preferences and moods that her caregivers and family members had to navigate. She was not interchangeable with the walls of her cottage. She was present, in whatever form that presence took after 1941.
The Last Years
In Rosemary Kennedy’s final years at Saint Coletta, the world outside the Jefferson, Wisconsin institution had changed enormously since she had arrived there in 1949. The Cold War had come and gone. The civil rights movement had transformed American society and law. Technology had remade daily life in ways that would have been incomprehensible to someone who had come of age in the 1930s. The Kennedy family name had become one of the most recognizable in American history.
Rosemary had lived through all of this at a remove, cared for by the Sisters of Saint Francis, visited by family, navigating the particular landscape of her daily life at Saint Coletta with whatever capacities remained to her.
In her eighties, she was in what her family and caregivers described as reasonably good health for her age. She was mobile, able to walk with assistance. She remained at the Kennedy cottage. The sisters who had been caring for her for years continued to do so.
The death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s husband Sargent Shriver in 2011 and Eunice’s own death in 2009 came after Rosemary’s death, so Rosemary did not outlive Eunice. What is documented is that Eunice remained connected to Rosemary through the last years of Rosemary’s life and that she was one of the four siblings present at the death in January 2005.