Assembly floor. He had been convinced their child would be born on Valentine's Day, the fourth anniversary of their engagement. After Assemblyman Roosevelt received a telegram the morning of the 13th notifying him of the birth, he made arrangements to leave that afternoon and be with his wife. Another telegram was sent and received regarding her ill health, and she was in a semi-comatose state by the time he arrived home, around midnight. Roosevelt languished for several hours while her husband held her; dying the afternoon of February 14, 1884, from undiagnosed kidney failure. It was determined that her pregnancy had masked the illness. Alice Roosevelt was 22 years old at the time of her death. Distraught following Alice Roosevelt's death, her husband hardly spoke of her again. Much to the frustration of their daughter, all Theodore Roosevelt revealed following his wife's death was a diary entry and a short, privately published tribute: In the immediate aftermath of Roosevelt's death, her widowed husband turned the care of their newborn daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt, over to her aunt Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt, the older sister of Theodore Roosevelt, because it was already clear to Roosevelt that his sister would remain unmarried. As she grew, Alice Lee learned of her mother primarily from Bamie Roosevelt and her Lee grandparents. Roosevelt never spoke to his daughter about her mother. He tore pages from this diary about his wife, and burned almost all of the letters they had written to each other over the years. Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, took custody of his daughter when she was three years old. Burial Roosevelt was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, next to her mother-in-law Mittie, who had died just hours before her. The families of each held a joint funeral for the women at New York's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. References External links The White House Presidents Alice Roosevelt Longworth page at the Theodore Roosevelt Association web site Theodore Roosevelt Association family biographies 1861 births 1884 deaths Bulloch family People from Boston Alice Lee, Alice Hathaway Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery Deaths from nephritis American socialites 19th-century American people 19th-century American women Deaths in childbirth