We spent our last day on Campobello Island touring the Roosevelt Cottage, the summer home of FDR and Eleanor.
I keep putting “cottage” in air quotes in my head. The word makes me picture something small. A woodstove and a couple of bedrooms. This is a 34-room house looking out over the ocean. For its time, the wealth and the access it represents are hard to take in. I stood in those rooms and felt the pull of two things at once. The history was fascinating. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how much suffering was happening in the world while a few families summered like this.
I didn’t fully reconcile that. I’m not sure you’re supposed to.
But the thing that stayed with me happened at the visitor center. My mom got to talking with a woman there, and at some point, the woman mentioned that people believe FDR’s spirit is still at the cottage.
I’m not here to argue about ghosts. What caught me was the idea behind it. There’s an old belief that spirits linger when they haven’t reconciled something. When there’s a piece of their life they never made peace with, so they can’t move on.
Here’s what makes that interesting to me. FDR didn’t die at Campobello. He died in Georgia. People usually say a place is haunted because someone died there. This is different. Campobello is where his life split in two.
In August of 1921, at 39 years old, Franklin Roosevelt got sick at that cottage. Within a couple of weeks, he was paralyzed from the waist down. He left the island on a stretcher. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and leg braces. If any place marks the before and after of his life, it’s that one.
So, I found myself wondering. If some part of him really is still there, what’s he sitting with?
It’s easy to imagine a version of him that never made peace with it. A man who looks back and thinks about everything he could have done if his body had stayed whole. The life he’d planned. Polio took the ground out from under one of the most ambitious men of his time.
But then I thought about what actually happened next.
This is the man who led the United States through the Great Depression. Then through World War II. He steadied a terrified country from a wheelchair he mostly kept hidden. A lot of historians believe his struggle with paralysis is part of what made him. That the patience, the empathy, and the sheer will he built while learning to live in a changed body became the same qualities the country leaned on later.
So, which is it? Did polio rob him of the life he wanted? Or did it forge the person who could carry a nation through its hardest years?
I think the answer might be in a Sufi poem, one attributed to Hazrat Inayat Khan. It gets at this better than anything I could write.
I asked for strength
and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom
and God gave me problems to learn to solve.
I asked for prosperity
and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.
I asked for courage
and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for love
and God gave me people to help.
I asked for favours
and God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted.
I received everything I needed.— Hazrat Inayat Khan, from the The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
That last turn is the whole thing. We so rarely get the thing we asked for. We get what we needed instead. That’s the tension, sitting in a wheelchair on Campobello.
I think this is where love and fear do their quiet work. Fear looks at the hard thing and only sees what it cost. It keeps a ledger of the other life, the one that got away. Love looks at the same hard thing and asks what it might have made possible. Not because the pain wasn’t real. Because the pain wasn’t the end of the story.
I don’t know what FDR made of his. Maybe he reconciled it and maybe he didn’t. Maybe that’s why the ghost story has merit. It’s a question we’re all a little haunted by.
Because we all have a Campobello. A place where the life we planned came apart. And most of us spend a lot of time ruminating over it.
So, I’ll leave it where I’m sitting with it. When you think about the hardest thing that’s happened to you, which story are you telling? The one about what it took from you? Or the one about who it made you?
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