Goodbye, Ted Kennedy

    For the past two days I have found myself crying off and on in mourning for Senator Kennedy. What follows is an attempt to explain to myself why.  

    My mother once told me that I sat in my playpen for days mesmerized by watching the Democratic National Convention during the summer of 1960.  Apparently I could not tear myself away from the black and white images of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson flickering on the screen.  My mother said that she fell asleep every night on the sofa during that week, amazed to watch her baby girl so rapt behind the wooden bars, the television’s images reflecting silver in her eyes.       

    When I was eight I got into big trouble with the leader of my Girl Scout troop for wearing my uniform as I distributed homemade pamphlets urging my neighbors to vote for Bobby Kennedy. The spring and summer of 1968 are seared into my memory: Philadelphia was under curfew (these were the Frank Rizzo years) and on every street corner in Powelton Village, my old neighborhood, people were openly and daily mourning Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. There was daily poetry, music, speeches, plus our usual more informal ranting, debating and placards.  The Kennedy family stories have played like public background music to the events of my own life; their victories, tragedies and ignominies were counterpoint to my own private ones. 

     I am sure that I chose a career in public service because of the example of the Ted Kennedy. I come from a highly imperfect political and intellectually ambitious family in which there has been no small amount of substance abuse. The beacons of light held out to me, all the civil rights heroes of the 1960s and 70s, showed that not only was it possible to overcome poverty and injustice in our community, but also my father’s abandonment of our family and my mother’s rapid decline into alcoholism.   The Kennedy example was powerful; after 1968 the ravages of tragedy and substance abuse became increasingly more obvious in their lives and in my own. I remember the media images of the young Ted Kennedy, looking so vulnerable, but sounding resolute as the new leader of his family. Some years later, after my mother finally died of alcoholism when I was sixteen, I decided to raise my brother on my own.  I thought that if Ted Kennedy could hold his head up and serve his country after such devastating tragedies, then so could I.  I knew that beneath my mother’s alcoholism and all the horrendous behavior that went along with it was a heart and soul devoted to the highest standard in Jewish culture: tikkun olam, to heal the world.  I decided to live for that standard as if my life depended on it, which, of course, it did.  Somehow I thought that the Kennedy family’s call to service was intertwined with what I was hearing from the rabbi whenever I was able to get myself to temple.