Just weeks later, according to History, Roosevelt was staying at his beloved Warm Springs, Georgia home with two cousins and his lover, Lucy Mercer. Elizabeth Shoumatoff was painting a portrait of the president. Earlier that day, per PBS, he had complained of pain in his head and neck, but it was a minor complaint that seemed to have eased. It was at 1 p.m. that the president suddenly said, “we have about 15 minutes more to work.” Soon afterward, his head fell, and his alarmed cousin Daisy rushed to ask him what was the matter. This was when he weakly stated he had a “terrific” headache, before losing consciousness.
Per History, this terrific pain was deemed by a doctor who was hurried to the scene to have been a cerebral hemorrhage on a catastrophic scale. By 3:30 p.m., Roosevelt’s death was confirmed. Harry S. Truman, who became the next president later that very same day, said that the news of Roosevelt’s death hit him “like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me”(per The White House). As his final words revealed, Roosevelt surely felt a terrible force of just such great strength.
