The Kennedy legacy: Torch and darkness

Over the weekend, about 30 Kennedys gathered around a firepit in Hyannis Port, Mass., telling stories about Saoirse Kennedy Hill, their 22-year-old cousin who died Aug. 1.

Saoirse’s uncle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shared a blurry snapshot on Instagram: Several of the adults rest their feet against the edge of the firepit. Children pile onto laps, sharing a red and white star-spangled blanket. Surrounded by darkness, the family members are indistinguishable from a distance.

Along with the somber image, RFK Jr. posted pictures of happier times: Saoirse, smiling and goofy, with her cousins at the beach, on the family sailboat, jumping off buoys and sharing an ice cream cone.

“The gaping hole that she leaves in our family is a wound too large to ever heal,” he wrote.

The family has lots of gaping holes left by young lives cut short — most famously two assassinations, and a plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy 20 years ago. With Saoirse’s death, which sources told The New York Times was an apparent overdose, tragedy has hit her generation.

The public is still fascinated by this dynasty. But what does it mean to be a fourth-generation Kennedy? There are more than 30 great-grandchildren descended from Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy, the Boston Globe counted. Most don’t even have Wikipedia pages. The family is so large that it’s possible for members to go unnoticed as a Kennedy until tragedy strikes, gossip erupts or someone runs for office.

The family history of both grief and greatness still hovers over Saoirse and her cousins. But like the hazy images around that firepit, their lives are hard to make out.

Saoirse (pronounced “SIRshuh”) was born 29 years after her grandfather Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated during his 1968 presidential campaign. Her dad is Paul Hill, an Irishman who was wrongly imprisoned for 15 years after confessing to Irish Republican Army bombings he didn’t commit. He married Courtney Kennedy shortly after his 1993 release, and by the time Saoirse was in elementary school, the family had moved from the United States to a small town in Ireland. “They want Saoirse brought up in an environment that is less manic” than the United States, a reporter wrote in the Scottish newspaper the Herald in 2002.

But the Kennedy legacy and the public mania it inspired waited for her on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Like her mother, she tried to stay out of the public eye,” said J. Randy Taraborrelli, who wrote “The Kennedy Heirs,” among several books about the family. But “they can’t escape the name.”

Nor can they seem to escape another aspect of the Kennedy legacy — the repeating cycles of grief, substance issues and mental illness. David Kennedy, son of RFK and one of Saoirse’s uncles, died in 1984 of a drug overdose.

“What I think people don’t know is that the fourth generation has been affected by watching their parents, their aunts and their uncles deal with so much trauma in their lives,” Taraborrelli said. “When your parents are overwhelmingly sad all the time, there’s something that’s obviously going to be passed down to the kids.”

In her senior year at Deerfield Academy in Western Massachusetts, Saoirse opened up about her struggle with depression, which she said took root in middle school. “Although I was mostly a happy child, I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest.”

Saoirse describes a time someone she knew and loved “broke serious sexual boundaries with me,” she wrote. “I did the worst thing a victim can do, and I pretended it hadn’t happened. This all became too much, and I attempted to take my own life.”

After that suicide attempt, Saoirse took medical leave, eventually graduating in 2016.

Saoirse became vice president of College Democrats at Boston College and “found great joy in volunteer work, working alongside indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico,” her aunt Kerry Kennedy posted on Instagram.

As the family has grown larger, members of Saoirse’s generation have become harder for the public to pinpoint. In a 2008 speech at a Barack Obama rally, the then-28-year-old Matt Kennedy joked about the peculiar obscurity of being known as a “Kennedy guy.”

Matt, who would go on to work for the Obama administration, told the crowd that he once disappointed a man who “stood a little perplexed and said, ‘Well darn it, I thought the important Kennedy was coming.’ ”

Matt’s twin brother, Joe Kennedy III, is the most politically successful of his generation — a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts since 2012.

There are the partyers and tabloid regulars such as Robert Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kyra Kennedy, whose fashion shoots and nightclub adventures have been chronicled in Harpers Bazaar and The New York Times. Her brother Conor is sometimes described in gossip magazines as a Kennedy second and Taylor Swift’s ex first.

Of John Kennedy’s three grandchildren — all by his daughter, Caroline — Rose Schlossberg went into acting while her journalist sister, Tatiana, is on tour promoting an upcoming book on climate change. Both appear reluctant to use the family moniker to promote their work.

But their brother, Jack Schlossberg, is not. During the 2016 election he wrote left-wing op-eds for Politico and The Washington Post, introduced in both as the late president’s grandson.

Other branches of the family have merged with other richand-famous clans. Katherine Schwarzenegger is the granddaughter of JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and the daughter of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Two of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s children work in entertainment. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy III is an actor, writer and producer. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy is a television and stage actor who appeared in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Gossip Girl,” “The Newsroom.” (She’s named after her great-aunt Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s younger sister, who became a widow at 24 and died in a plane crash at age 28.)

On Monday, Saoirse’s funeral brought family members from 91-year-old Ethel Kennedy on down to small children, unnamed in photographers’ captions. Saoirse was buried outside a small white church in Hyannis Port, next to her aunt Mary Richardson Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s second wife, who died by suicide in 2012 — another life snapped short in the family tree.