The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of

The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women

Rosemary (Rosie) Kennedy was born in 1918, the first daughter of a wealthy Bostonian couple who later would become known as the patriarch and matriarch of Americaâ€™s most famous and celebrated family.
Elizabeth Koehler was born in 1957, the first and only child of a struggling Wisconsin farm family.
What, besides their religion, did these two very different Catholic women have in common?
One person: Stella Koehler, a charismatic woman of the cloth who became Sister Paulus Koehler after taking her vows with the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis of Assisi.
Sister Paulus was Elizabeth's Wisconsin aunt. For thirty-five yearsâ€•indeed much of her adult lifeâ€•Sister Paulus was Rosie Kennedyâ€™s caregiver.
And a caregiver, tragically, had become necessary after Rosie, a slow learner prone to emotional outbursts, underwent one of Americaâ€™s first lobotomiesâ€•an operation Joseph Kennedy was assured would normalize Rosieâ€™s life. It did not. Rosieâ€™s condition became decidedly worse.
After the procedure, Joe Kennedy sent Rosie to rural Wisconsin and Saint Coletta, a Catholic-run home for the mentally disabled. For the next two decades, she never saw her siblings, her parents, or any other relative, the doctors having issued stern instructions that even the occasional family visit would be emotionally disruptive to Rosie.
Following Joseph Kennedyâ€™s stroke in 1961, the Kennedy family, led by mother Rose and sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, resumed face to face contact with Rosie.
It was also about then that a young Elizabeth Koehler began paying visits to Rosie.
In this insightful and poignant memoir, based in part on Sister Paulusâ€™ private notes and augmented by over one-hundred never-before-seen photos, Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff recalls the many happy and memorable times spent with the â€œmissing Kennedy.â€
She looks at the many parallels between Rosieâ€™s post-operative life, her own, and those of the two families.
And, most important, she traces how, entirely because of Rosie, the Kennedy and Shriver families embarked on an exceedingly consequential campaign advancing the cause of the developmentally disabledâ€•a campaign that continues to this day.
Ten years after Rosieâ€™s death comes a highly personal yet fitting testimonial to a sad but truly meaningful and important life.
Country USA
Manufacturer Bancroft Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-08-26
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Bancroft Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-08-26
Format	Kindle eBook

The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women

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