A Time to Stand Aside

I have been thinking about Ted Kennedy--a lot--as all of us have done.
I have been thinking about the way he held his private and public lives together.
His private life remained as private as the public would allow.

Much of his public life has almost escaped us, in spite of the fact
that we know he has been one of our most accomplished Senators.
Only two Senators in the history of the nation served longer than he,
and neither of those approached his record of accomplishment.

There have been others as important--let us say, perhaps, ten--
in the whole history of the nation, who have marked us
as deeply as Ted Kennedy has done.
His name is on our honorable decisions.

 It is impossible, at a time like this, not to think about our own deaths.
Perhaps, in my case, it is absolutely inescapable.
I was born only a few months before him, and I am sitting here,
at the computer, sharing the same age as he when he died.
I, too, am seventy-seven. Both of us came from large families.
There is not much else in common. Or maybe there is.
Both of us shared a dominating father and a supportive mother.
That might be it. That, and our politics. My father,
probably because he understood, and did not understand,
his own birthright and mess of pottage, came bitterly to parentage.

 We seven were scorned from what he hoped we would achieve.
The Rose in our lives tried to tell us what she did not really believe.
As a consequence, I am one of seven disgruntled siblings,
having been trained, too early on, to believe less than what was true.

We seven are no Kennedy family. We are no more nor no less gifted,
I think, in disparate ways, but we have wasted our time,
without whatever it is that holds families together.
We have learned too much scorn, and not enough recognition
that the human family is larger than we knew.

I did not hear her say it, but even my mother said of the Fratuchellis,
or whomever they were, down the road and to the south,
 that "They were Italian, but they were nice!" We learned to talk like that.

This is silly, this comparison between Ted Kennedy and his family,
and almost any of the rest of us, for reasons of . . . of accomplishment,
I suppose . . . but, nonetheless, the stories of the last few days
have made it plain that Ted Kennedy, and something about his family,
 is not true about most of the rest of us: he maintained family.

His father was ambitious to the point of lawlessness,
but something in his father wanted his children to give back.
He trained them to recognize their privileged position.
He trained them to talk together, and to be honest about themselves.
He trained them to care about each other while they looked honestly
at the inequities he had earned for them, and to do something about it,
without being stupid and by donning sack cloth,
but by being political, and personal, and by using their privilege
for a good beyond themselves.

I wish I could say I were not a member of my own family,  but I am.
I have learned to isolate myself, to scorn ways we deny our own
Chappaquiddicks, and to blame them on someone else.

Ted Kennedy went to the funeral of Mary Jane Kopechne.
He assumed that burden. What I do know is that Ted Kennedy,
for all of his faults, for all of his burdens, was a far,
far better human being than most of us. He became that.
Something in his privilege, and something in his humanity,
 made him a glorious and flawed human being.

He was like his family: glorious and flawed and to be grieved.
I would like to say that Ted Kennedy has taught us how to be a father,
 or that he has taught us how to care for each other, how to be political
or how to be private, but those two things cannot be dissected.

He was neither a saint nor a sinner: he was both. He was human.
He was deeper than shallow choices. He was a mensch.

There is a time to stand aside, to praise, and to weep.