The final hospitalization at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin — a small city about sixty miles from Saint Coletta — suggests that Rosemary’s death came after a health decline serious enough to require hospital rather than residential care. The cause was listed as natural causes, consistent with the death of an eighty-six-year-old woman after a long life.
Jean, Eunice, Patricia, and Ted Kennedy were there. They had traveled to Wisconsin to be with their sister as she died. They sat with her in the hospital room in Fort Atkinson, in the cold of a Wisconsin January, and they were present when she stopped breathing.
It was January 7, 2005.
The Burial and What It Says
Rosemary Kennedy was buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts, beside her parents. The choice of burial location placed her back in the landscape of her origins — the Boston Irish Catholic world from which the entire Kennedy family had come, the neighborhood where she had been born in 1918, the community in which her father had built his first bank and her mother had grown up as the daughter of a mayor.
The symmetry of the burial — beside Joe and Rose, in the place where she was born — does not erase the asymmetry of the decades in between, the twenty years of absence, the surgery in Washington, the decades in Wisconsin. But it marks something: that in death, at least, she was returned to the family and the place she had come from.
The stones in Holyhood Cemetery do not distinguish between the children who became famous and the one who didn’t. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., who died in a World War II bombing mission in 1944. Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish, who died in a plane crash in France in 1948. Rose Marie Kennedy, who died of natural causes in 2005 at eighty-six, having outlived most of the brothers and sisters whose public lives became the Kennedy legend.