How much grief can one woman take?

Peter Sheridan

FOR Ethel Kennedy, the 91-year-old matriarch of the venerable American blue-blood clan, this weekend brought yet more heartbreak to a lifetime of tragedy.

Her granddaughter and great-grandson were declared dead, after going missing in a seemingly frivolous boating accident.

Cynics speak of the “Kennedy Curse” but for Ethel, the widow of Robert F Kennedy, the losses are shockingly real.

“It’s never-ending for her,” a close Kennedy family source told People magazine. “She has lost her husband, two of her children, her nephew John and now two of her grandchildren, and a greatgrandchild. It’s unimaginable.”

And that’s not to mention the loss of her brother-in-law President John F Kennedy, having three children in rehab, one son’s arrest for heroin possession, another son’s shocking affair with a babysitter, and a nephew’s rape trial.

But for much of the Kennedy clan, many of the tragedies – too often self-inflicted – are a result of the stranglehold Ethel kept on the dynasty, her distant parenting and ferocious temper.

Murdered... JFK, left, and Robert Indifferent

“Her approach was what today people would call ‘tough love’,” said her son, Robert Kennedy Jr, aged 66, in his biography. “Her exceptional qualities were mainly invisible to me as a child.”

Ethel was accused of being an inattentive, indifferent mother to her 11 children.

She was a long-time human rights advocate and environmental activist, and yet Robert Jr was horrified by her “demeaning treatment” of staff as “evidence of maternal hypocrisy”.

Ethel “divided the world into friend and foe”, he wrote. “Generally she judged the latter by harsher standards, and yet she sometimes discarded time-honoured friendships for minor infractions.

“I faulted her for being mercurial and arbitrary.”

Ethel flew into rages, and her “flurries of temper appeared to me haphazard”.

The assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963, and of Ethel’s husband Robert – the former US Attorney General then running for

Drowned...Maeve and Gideon got into a canoe in an attempt to retrieve a ball in the water

president, in 1968 – cast long shadows over the family.When JFK was killed, his brother Bobby plunged into “six months of just... –”, said Ethel. “It was like Bobby had lost both arms.”

Ethel, equally derailed after her own husband’s death, demanded that all her children and grandchildren live up to the Kennedys’ ideals of excellence and service, invariably setting them all up for disappointment. In the family’s competitive environment winning was everything. Robert Jr admits to “failing to be the person whom both she and I wanted me to be”. Daughter Kathleen Kennedy admits: “Trying hard didn’t cut it.” Falling off her horse and breaking a leg, she was only taken to hospital four days later. Ultra-competitive, Ethel was notorious at tennis for calling close balls “out” and chastised Jackie Kennedy for failing to join in the clan’s roughhousing games and sports. She branded her children “slow” if they failed to recall details of each Sunday’s church sermon, demanded that they clear up yet left her own laundry laying around, and let her numerous children eat breakfast and lunch whenever they wished, driving their chefs to exasperation. Her behaviour grew erratic, and her children feared “the Wrath of Ethel”. “Kennedys don’t cry,” was the family ethos.And yet they had so much to cry about.

The assassinations of JFK and RFK were just the beginning. Ethel lost two children.

David, 28, was found dead in a hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, from a drug overdose in 1984, having battled addiction for years.

Michael, aged 39, died skiing in Aspen, Colorado, in 1997, crashing into a tree while playing a dangerous Alpine sport.

Three of Ethel’s sons were in rehab: David, Joseph and Robert Jr – the latter arrested for heroin possession.

Ethel’s nephew John Kennedy Jr, the president’s 38-year-old son, died in 1999 when the small plane he was piloting became lost in fog and crashed off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22, died last August of an overdose at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

And this weekend Ethel’s granddaughter Maeve, aged 40, and great-grandson Gideon, aged eight, were declared dead after being lost at sea on Thursday.

Capsized

Their deaths, near their waterfront home in Shady Side, Maryland, seem like a tragic scene from the theatre of the absurd. “Gideon and Maeve were playing kickball by the shallow cove behind the house, and one of them kicked the ball into the water,” said Maeve’s husband, David McKean.

The pair jumped in a canoe and paddled out to retrieve the ball, but “somehow got pushed by wind or tide into the open bay”.

The Coast Guard found their canoe capsized and no sign of mother or child.

“It is clear that Maeve and Gideon have passed away,” said David on Saturday, after two days of failed searches.

Ethel Skakel was born the sixth of seven children in a prosperous Irish-American family, not unlike the Kennedys and with so many children of her own was always surrounded by family.

Yet today she grieves alone, as many family members keep their distance because of her advanced years and vulnerability to Covid-19.

A deeply religious Catholic, Ethel might recall the words of advice she once gave son Robert Jr: “We feel like we ought to be able to write our own scripts to our lives, and sometimes we feel disappointed in God when life rewrites the plot.The key is acceptance and gratitude.

“We need to practise wanting what we’ve got, not what we wish we had.”

For the Kennedy matriarch determined that her family succeed at all costs, that may be small comfort.