He determined from then on to “train myself painfully and
laboriously, not merely as regards my body but as regards my soul
and spirit.” His determination ultimately paid off, so that as a stu-
dent at Harvard—now Teddy—he became a lightweight boxer. He
embraced physical action all his life, conquering his fears, explain-
ing: “By acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
But lying ahead was an even greater crisis than his dealing
with the dichotomy of his dreams versus his weak and sickly body.
When Teddy was midway through college, the future presi-
dent’s father, whom he now considered his “best and most inti-
mate friend,” became sick with cancer of the stomach. For three
months he suffered, and when he was nearing death, crowds gath-
ered outside their home, including orphans and homeless children
who loved him. When his father’s agony ended in his untimely
death, his family was devastated. Young Theodore considered it a
“hideous dream.” For months he anguished over the loss, remem-
bering the Sunday when he had “kissed the dear, dead face.”
In the margin of his Bible he wrote, beside Psalm 69, “I am
weary of my crying: my throat is dry: my eyes fail while I wait for
my God.” He remembered his father’s walking with him in his
arms when he was an asthmatic child. “Sometimes, when I fully
realize my loss, I feel as if I should go mad.”
Yet the younger Theodore, despite the depths of his grief, did
not go mad. With two more years left at Harvard, he went back
to his studies, athletics—and the pursuit of a young woman with
whom he had fallen deeply in love and whom he determined to
marry. “She won’t have me, but I’m going to have her!” he told a
friend. He eagerly, passionately focused his last two college years
on winning Alice Lee.
Unlike Billy’s experience with Emily Cavanaugh, Theodore
was successful, and he was deliriously happy when she accepted
his proposal. He wrote in his diary, “I do not think ever a man
loved a woman more... .”
The remarkable passage of “making” himself physically and
emotionally in adolescence, then emerging from the depths of
grief over his father with a determination to emulate him, resulted
Igniting!