A Day in the Life

Tiresome to work so hard the way I did yesterday, up at 5, yoga at 7, food-shopping 'til 9 then fanny to the chair like any good grownup trying to earn a dollar. No breakfast ‘til 10, no lunch ‘til 4, no supper ‘til ‘8 – but one good thing came of all this work: for the anniversary of Ted Kennedy's death I wrote a few words about Rosemary Kennedy and sent it off to the Huffington Post, along with both a picture of that poor girl as my family knew her and the scanned-in letter she wrote to us just six months before her lobotomy.I did this in honor of Teddy and of Eunice, who did so much for people like Rosemary. All these years later no one seems to really know what was wrong with her. Was she merely slow, or emotionally disturbed too? Or did she have some totally treatable affliction like Tourette’s?Never mind. She is safe now and out of the rain, as are all but one of her siblings.Tomorrow I'll probably go back to cracking jokes and posting pictures of cats writing emails but for now this, Teddy eulogizing the second of his slain brothers, just because it is so very moving.  Then click here , and see his poor sister's letter.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwmmdKMuUqY&feature=related]

The Left Behind

A final posting on Teddy, next to this picture I took in Hyannis, 48 hours before his passing

I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about the ones left behind, sister and wife and children. I was thinking too of Ted himself missing the handsome oldest brother Joe, and those sisters,  and especially  Jack and Bobby, just  missing them all, that youngest brother, decade after lonely decade.I thought too of my own family, my grandfather Michael so young when his first wife died at 31 and still young when his second wife died at 42. He gave up on love then and turned inward toward his five children, who so adored him they could hardly bear to marry and start their own lives, knowing it meant leaving e him.In 1921 he built a summer home in the Berkshires, a place he loved above all others and saw again in hallucination hours before he died. At some point – after the first bereavement? the second? -  he put a piece of verse over the living room fireplace where it stayed for more than 40 years. I was present when our mother and aunt took it down the day we turned the place over  to new owners.This verse is by Longfellow who knew something about what it feels like to be left behind as his young wife burned to death one summer day trying to seal  locks of her children’s hair in wax . He  himself was burned so severely in his effort to smother the flames that he could not attend her funeral and ever after wore a beard to hide the facial scarring.I memorized the lines in childhood and don't they cone back to me still with the force of a blow almost, every time I think of the sad and sorrowing ones left behind. It goes like this:

Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have saidBeneath this roof at midnight, in the daysThat are no more, and shall no more return.Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;I stay a little longer, as one staysTo cover up the embers that still burn.

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

Rosemary Kennedy

She was a beautiful girl: some say the prettiest of the bunch.Here's what she looked like in the summer of 1940 when she came to our camp for three weeks and papa Joe Kennedy was off in England  as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James and mama Rose was dividing her time between their winter home in New York and their summer place on the Cape.This was a scant 18 months before her lobotomy. It was a 'groundbreaking' procedure that we now know was badly botched. It broke her family's hearts, 'losing' her this way. Her siblings certainly you can see that in everything you read .Her second letter to my mom after having had to leave camp appears in the post under this one.  It was a different era and not a better one.  Today she'd be working at the Stop and Shop and going to dances with her pals on weekends.

Eunice and the 'Other Sister'

I could look at pictures of Eunice all day, hero that she was for trying to do for others what she couldn’t do at home. She was just 19 when sister Rosemary was lobotomized according to their father's wishes. He didn’t even tell Rose he had ordered it done 'til the surgery was over and they realized to their horror that she would never again stand erect, never again write the kind of letter that appears below here. My mother and aunt owned and ran a girls’ camp called Fernwood and in the spring of 1940, Rose Kennedy asked to meet them in New York to talk about her 22-year-old ‘working’ there as a Junior Counselor. Mom used to say she should have known the minute Mrs. Kennedy arrived without her daughter that the girl was not as 'able' as Rose was leading them to believe and sure enough, her care proved to be too much for everyone and her time at Camp Fernwood ended early, something the vacationing Mrs. Kennedy was most unhappy about.Rosemary was unhappy too as  you can tell reading this letter she sent to my mom and aunt. See the wistfulness in it, the brave good cheer. Now imagine that within a few short months all this liveliness would be erased. Unlucky for Rose and Joe’s handsome oldest girl! Lucky for us to have had her little sister to raise our consciousness around all issues of the differently abled!