May You Rest Now, Ted; You Felt Like My Brother

I wanted to go last might but it was 9:00 before I got free and could I do it really? Stand in the dark for hours with the temps down in the 50s and the wind off the water the way it always is?I wanted to go so badly because I had just realized for the first time that the same number of years separate Ted Kennedy and me as once separated him and his oldest brother.We could have been siblings, Teddy and I.In a way I felt that we were:I mean, his people are buried in the same cemetery as my people. As I recently wrote his sister, the slow one, attended the summer  camp my  family owned and ran. His dad came through Boston Latin School, same as my mom. His grandfather was Mayor of Boston and my grandfather ran for that office, though the other Irish called him Yankee-on-the-inside and a traitor to his race, just because he was upright and bold and fought the abuses of that famous old scoundrel James Michael Curley. For years my grandfather was Chairman of the Boston FinCom and of the Boston School Committee too and a first-generation American with roots in County Kerry, born of a woman who could not read or write English. And yet he studied and he learned and he studied some more and before he was 35 he was not only a Boston lawyer of note but a judge too, and the individual whose honorary degree from Harvard then-President Lowell said had given him the most pleasure to confer.My sister Nan and I grew up in this grandfather’s house. I thought he was our father until Nan set me straight. (He can't be our dad! He has white hair, stupid!" Certainly he acted as a father to us – that is until the day he fell and was taken away and showed up eight weeks later in a polished box looking thin and wholly unrecognizable with a nose like a plow-blade. “That’s not him,” Nan snorted before turning away from the casket and scooping up a pile of prayer cards which she used to invent elaborate games for us in the far-back rooms of that grand old funeral home in Kenmore Square.I last saw Ted Kennedy in person on a fall day when I met Bill Clinton who had flown into Logan. He stood off to one side looking like his back hurt. I first saw him in 1960 at a political rally addressed by then-Speaker-of-the-House John McCormack. I was just nine years old at the time but I still remember old McCormack pointing his bony finger at Nan and me in the front row. “THESE young ladies down front!” he thundered in some future-invoking burst of rhetoric. That same fall, our Uncle Jack drove us to Manchester NH the night before Teddy’s big brother was elected President. I got to touch the great man’s shirtfront; Nan got to shake the great man's hand.Forty years later my girl Annie worked in Ted’s office in spring semester of her junior year at Smith. One day she was sent downstairs to get him his lunch and when she was just boarding the elevator back up, here came Massachusetts' other Senator John Kerry, with a large retinue of aids and assistants.They crowded in, almost crushing her in the corner. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me!” she said,  fixing Kerry with a look of mock-outrage. “What I have here is the SENIOR  Senator’s lunch!”  (She’s always been like that, this Annie of ours: breezy and funny and joking around with the cops and custodians and all.)“The Senior Senator’s lunch eh?” said Kerry, catching the spirit of the banter. Well I HOPE IT'S A SALAD!"Annie’s impression of the man lying in state today? That he was universally respected on Capitol Hill; that he was universally loved.Part of me wishes Ted would be buried in Holyhood Cemetery near my mother and grand-father; near his own mom and his rascally dad and his poor sad sister Rosemary whom he never abandoned.But he will lie beneath the sod at Arlington National.He will be near his real brothers, this pretend big brother of mine. And when you recall the catch in his throat every time he spoke of them you have no doubt that there is where he should lie.Requiescat in pacem, as we all so often in a world now vanished forever.  Et lux perpetua luceat eum.

I took this on Kalmus Beach  Hyannis just the other day