The Ghost at the Cottage

On our last day on Campobello, we toured FDR's summer cottage. It's a 34-room house looking out over the ocean, and standing in those rooms stirred up more than history.

At the visitor center, someone mentioned that people believe FDR's spirit still lingers there. I'm not here to argue about ghosts. What caught me was the idea behind it. There's an old belief that spirits stay when they never made peace with something.

FDR didn't die at Campobello. But it's where his life split in two. In August of 1921, at 39, he got sick at that cottage and was soon paralyzed from the waist down. He left the island on a stretcher and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. If any place marks the before and after of his life, it's that one.

So, I found myself wondering what his spirit might be sitting with. The life he lost? Or the one the hardship made possible? This is the man who led the country through the Great Depression and a world war, and many believe his struggle is part of what forged him. I even found a Sufi poem that gets at this better than I can.

That's where love and fear do their quiet work. Fear keeps a ledger of the life that got away. Love asks what the hard thing made possible. Not because the pain wasn't real. Because it wasn't the end of the story.

We all have a Campobello. A place where the life we planned came apart. The question is which story we tell about it.

Read the full piece on Substack.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org