Over a series of days, a body travels a long way. A man is lost to the world and his family. His body lies in repose, is taken to the church where a funeral mass is conducted, is flown to Washington, DC in the belly of a plane, is carried through the streets of Washington in a motorcade, is taken out, in casket, to the cemetery, and then, is buried close to his brothers, at what we, the living, call at rest.
Inter, tomb, bury, the grave--these words all make me shiver. The mere thought of memorial sends me into tears, because it means finality in a way I'm not ready for. The ashes in my house, I have here with me, can wait. I can't see ever burying them. But ceremony--that needs to happen. Just not yet. Just not yet.
I follow that other body, so pulled by the news that I have watched closely at every step of that journey. Is it distraction? Or is it a beginning to reckon with the body and rest? With some kind of end?
A brash, old man, red-cheeked and blustery, that wild white hair, fighting at the top of his lungs for the unhealthy and poor and lost and unlucky. A girl swirled down into the water, caught in a car with the windows shut tight. A young man strapped to a stretcher, cross-eyed with pain, his back broken when his plane crashes down and itself breaks into pieces. A man at a graveside, and another, and another--a man too acquainted with burial. The public moments and images get played and replayed; the overused talk of the Curse and Tragedy of one family comes again to the lips of the newscasters. But still these reports, in their compounding and weight, stay with me and make me think, pull me in as not as a bystander but a mourner.
There's a tinge of the salacious for many in the deaths and shootings and illegalities and boozing and missteps that mark one family's history. There's, alternately, the hagiography of this last big, great patriarch and all he did for the little guy. But my ear is attuned to something different. How friends will say that, underneath this outsized public persona, was an essentially private man. How those who worked with him early in their lives and found their own ways in among government and power say such things as "He was so completely human - in a way you don't see very often in someone who had built up so much power. He used that power to lessen the pain and burden on others even when he could not at times lessen his own." How even those who condemned his politics, but who worked alongside him in government, honored his dedication to the work and his convictions.
Here was a person who struggled to balance public and private and whose life was touched by so much loss and grief. How could I not see him as a compatriot? How could I not mourn his loss as a fellow bearer of loss?
Since the announcement of his death, the air has been full of remembrance. I like the way that his death calls up his life, how I trace from from a tell-it-like-it-is feminist to a writer "at the western edge of the American West"--to land on Charles P. Pierce's fine Boston Globe article that addresses Kennedy in complication, recounting both successes and deep failures and all the more important in-betweens that made up the measure of the man. Pierce writes of the ways in which the Senator refused to overlook not just the big ideas of Injustice, but also the silent moments of sorrow in the face of human loss:
On April 27, 2001, a bus carrying band members from the Oak Hill Middle School in Newton overturned on a highway in the Canadian Maritimes. Four children were killed. In Washington, a man whose child went to Oak Hill boarded an airplane in order to hurry home. He saw Edward Kennedy on the plane. The man told him what had happened. That's where he was going, the senator had replied.At the school, volunteers gathered from all over Newton to help out. Along one wall, they'd hung broad swatches of blank white paper so that the children could express their sorrow and say their goodbyes. On the second afternoon of the melancholy vigil, a volunteer looked out and saw Kennedy, alone in the hallway, no aides around him and no cameras in sight. He was slowly, carefully, reading every single message left by every grieving child.
See him there in the hallway, alone, painfully private, and you see him as he is, the basic material of how he's built his career. You see all he's left behind - the life of metaphor and the life of symbol. He survived them both, until there's just the one life, 70 years on, just as if he'd been named Edward Moore. His tragedies are no greater or lesser than are those of the schoolchildren and their parents - no more important, no longer gilded for public consumption.
He was good with death that day. He's never lost there, not even in the deepest part of that inexhaustible mystery. His compass is true, and his touch never less than fine. And it is, of course, familiar ground.
From this familiar, common ground and into the honored ground of Arlington Cemetery, where he was the third brother of one single family to be buried, where his body lies with 300,000 others and the Tomb of the Unknown. We bury him among the bones of his family, among the remains of citizens and those who served, and with those who were also lost to the world but remain unnamed in and by death.
I do not think this man would begrudge the way he stirs me, how I read too carefully about the pain his brain cancer caused, knowing all too well, given my son's diagnosis, the way that part of the body can cause the hardest betrayal of life. I think he might, had we spoken, listen to me tell him how chose a name for our son from that of another man in public service--a fellow soul--who fought hard against what was wrong. I think he might have taken a moment for L. and grieved with me; I think he would know, and I would know, and there need not be words for that.
Call this imagined connection the delusion of any small person who thinks herself connected to someone larger in the world. But the fact is that laws in place that Kennedy fought for and helped pass, rights he continued to battle for against deep opposition in this country, directly affected my life and those of so many others. Call him a blowhard, a womanizer, a drunkard, a coward, a hypocrite--it wouldn't make sense for me to argue on any of these points because we'd get nowhere, and because it's all beside the point. What remains, and what is individually, powerfully true, is that he sat down and wrote language and stood up for and saw into laws that protected women, that allowed people to go their daily jobs with some measure of protection against terror and violence, and most meaningfully to me, that he provided some easing of the terror that confronted me and other women and their partners who have had to hear the doctors say their terrible news and know that the right thing was the hardest thing in the world a parent would ever have to do, because he made sure that the right thing was even possible in so wrong a world. If I am angry about the ways that politics stood straight up in those hospital rooms and circumscribed what the doctors could and would tell us--and make no mistake, I am angry enough to burn down the world--I also recognize the political realities of this country that may mean the doctors were more frank than they thought they even should be.
I worry that with this man's burial, we bury understanding of the private by those in public life. I worry that we bury the belief that we will ever be listened to--individually, personally, out of our own truths and lives--by those who rule. I'm losing my own power to believe in representation--that what might seem as miniscule grief but that still matters in the larger picture of what it means to live an American life in this era, will have no place in the halls of the Hart Senate Office Building. I worry that I can't name one more senator or representative on either side who fights with such depth of caring for people who are different from himself, those without privilege and access. I worry that, even now, those people shouting in Town Hall meetings from prepared scripts and controlled pr campaigns in the false guise of free speech are already winning, dancing as they do on this new grave, only to end in guaranteeing more pain. And what happens when they have to recognize, finally, what they need instead when they are faced with the life-and-death questions as we all inevitably are, that what they've shouted so fervently against, is the only thing thing that could bring about any chance to heal or, when that's not possible, to allow the good death at the center of their own families--I worry for them, because they will have so saddened those of us once not afraid to face the truth of our own grief that we will turn away and refuse, with due cause, to turn back towards one another.
I'm a Canadian observer to this public grieving, and have been really moved by the deep connection people have to this man. This is one of the best things I've read about his life and what it meant. And I share your worries - for your country, and for my own.
Posted by: annacyclopedia | September 03, 2009 at 12:30 PM