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Death has been ever present in my life. I was named for my aunt Kathleen, who died in a plane crash three years before I was born. My brother Joe was named for our uncle Joe, who had been killed in World War II, as had Kathleen's husband, Billy Hartington. My parents, Robert and Ethel, often talked about these three young people, each dead before the age of 30.
My aunt Kik was beautiful, lively, and giving. She had gone to England during the war to help and to be with the man she loved. My uncle Joe was smart, athletic, brave. They were in my thoughts daily. We prayed for them by name at every Sunday Mass, at the daily Mass we attended during the summers, and during nightly prayers. So while I didn't know my aunt and uncles and had never actually met them in the flesh, remembering them and honoring their memory was part of our daily ritual. I knew from the youngest age that death would take the vivacious and the brave. Immunity was not possible.
When I was just four years old, my mother's parents were killed in a plane crash. Now death was even more present. I had known my grandparents, George and Ann. I had hugged them, sat on their laps, and visited their home in Greenwich, Connecticut, over Christmas. I saw vividly how sad my mother became. I have a memory of my father carrying her up and down the stairs because she was so brokenhearted that she could barely walk. I probably conflated that memory with the birth of my brother David. Still, the fragility that death bred remains fixed in my consciousness.
My grandparents' names were added to Joe's and Kik's as the family members we should pray for.
Then my uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was killed when I was 12. A few years later, another uncle of mine, George Skakel, Jr.--my mother's brother--and one of my father's best friends, Dean Markham, were killed in a plane crash. Dean and his wife, Susie, were our neighbors. They had five children. They carpooled with us. Nine months later, George's wife, the mother of my four cousins, choked on a piece of food and died. My four orphaned cousins were sent to live with an aunt and uncle.
My father was killed in June 1968 when I was 16 and the oldest of ten children. My youngest sister was born in December of that year.
While we were in college, one of my best friends committed suicide.
For my 25th birthday, I asked for a skull and got one. I admit that when I opened that present, the guests at the party, who'd been expecting some lovely trinket, I am sure--bath salts or a beautiful bowl--were shocked. There was momentary silence.
In college, a close friend told me that she had never been to a funeral. In the late 1950s and early '60s, her experience wasn't unique for people our age. The baby boomers grew up with death as a distant thought. But not me. A friend with whom I'd bought a car--a Volkswagen, for $200--was beaten senseless by thugs in 1971 and stayed in a coma for 30 years before he died. My brother David died of a drug overdose; my brother Michael, in a freak skiing accident. My cousin John and his wife and sister-in-law died in a plane crash just before my sister Rory's wedding.
Many of these deaths are not news to you. They're part of the public record.
What remains a mystery is how people cope. How do we go on?
The most straightforward answer I can give is: the same way that generations before have gone on. We acknowledge the pain and the loss. We develop rituals--religious services, music, funerals, and wakes--where friends gather, hug one another, cry together, and share stories and laughs. And we remember.
I don't like the saying "Time heals all wounds." It is not true. Years later, people can still be terribly sad and miss their mother, father, child, sibling, friend. Scars remain unhealed.
A decade after my uncle Joe and my aunt Kathleen died, my grandfather Joseph Kennedy wrote a letter to a friend whose son had died following brain surgery. Here's what he said:
Dear Jack,
There are no words to dispel your feelings at this time, and there is no time that will ever dispel them. Nor is it any easier the second time than it was the first. And yet I cannot share your grief, because no one could share mine.
When one of your children goes out of your life, you think of what he might have done with a few more years and you wonder what you are going to do with the rest of yours.
You never really accept it; you just go through the motions.
Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find yourself a part of it again, trying to accomplish something--something that he did not have time enough to do.
And, perhaps, that is the reason for it all. I hope so.
Sincerely,
Joe
I often hear people express sympathy for my losses, how difficult it must be to be in the public eye--to have these tragedies happen on the world stage.
In fact, I think it is a blessing. Remember how I mentioned that my college friend had died? For a few years, his mother and I would write each other. But then the letters slowed and finally stopped.
I would see his friends, and we would talk about the wonderful Andrew Wojciehowski--his love of Billie Holiday, his brilliance, his leadership in helping me build a fireplace in my mother's home. But then our mutual friends graduated and went their separate ways. Now seldom do we reconnect. And when we do, we talk not about the past but about the present and the future. I remember Andrew in my heart, but it's a solitary memory, not shared.
In contrast, people all over the world know my father and uncle. Their legacies are large. There are monuments, libraries, universities, hospitals, highways, an airport. Their speeches are quoted. Countless authors have written books, documentaries, and dramatizations. Hardly a day passes that I don't meet someone who hasn't been touched by them, literally. A woman tells me she saw my father in Buffalo when he visited that city, or a man from Dubuque tells me how my father stepped out of the crowd to shake his hand.
Presidents and prime ministers from other countries tell me how my father welcomed them to his office in Washington when they were foreign students. I hear how he helped a sick child, set up a scholarship program, raised money for an urban park. Because of John and Robert Kennedy, someone became a teacher or a social worker, joined the Peace Corps or the war on poverty, or entered politics.
I feel that their spirit lives. It lives in the work of so many who still think of these two remarkable brothers. It lives in the stories that are told, in the work that these men started-work that continues. The good is not interred with their bones but springs forth in a variety of ways.
They were fortunate. President Kennedy, when asked what happiness was, quoted the ancient Greek definition of happiness as "the full use of your powers along lines of excellence." These two had large talents, and they were able to use them. Most satisfyingly, they used their talents for good. The belief that they lived a life of purpose permeates my memory.
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