Day 81 - The End of Something

As I type, the voices of my family lull and crest in the next room. I hear chatter and laughter. I'm pretty sure there's games. I had all these ideas for things to tell you. About the cake for my brother. Or the way Nova lights up a room, like the star she is.

I was going to tell you about the new beachhouse, and how the plates in the cupboards remind me of my grandmothers. How they jolt me back to the smell of the lake cabin and my young cousins in the Minnesota summer air, light as the sun's rays.

I was going to tell you...and I will...

Later.

For today, I'm thinking hard about Ted Kennedy. This month, Death rules the media. As one larger-than-life figure falls after another. It's Jackson or Fawcett or Cronkite, one headline trumps another. We march to the cemetary together, waiting for Larry King to interview friends/family/collegues. We tire of the talking heads and retire to bed. And so it is...

Icon after icon, I barely blink.

But Kennedy, Mr. Ted Kennedy, this one gets me good. Of all the eulogies, it's his--"the lion of the Senate"-- I record. It's his I watch, and my body pumps blood into my heart until it aches. The whole thing feels bigger than me. Than any of us.

Grainy black and white images static-cling to the screen as the 1960's-era voice of a young and handsome Ted Kennedy floats into the room from a CNN broadcast. As the pictures move and Kennedy moves through them, soft-spoken and compassionate, the time period itself mesmerizes me.

The music rises to the occasion as a tragic war and the struggle for civil rights shreds the nation. Our hearts break and break. The scars are everywhere, like gravesites scored in the ground. Bob Dylan thumps his hollow guitar. Janis screams at us.

In 1963, Ted loses his brother. In 1968, Ted loses another brother. His voice breaks while speaking to the crowd at Bobby's funeral; his body hunches and a wave of hurt bends his back as he tries to compose himself at the pulpit. Words of hope. He gives.

Making meaning out of memory, he focused almost completely on the causes him and his brothers championed: civil rights, an end to war, the poor, the sick, the hungry. He embodied the words of Emma Lazarus's poem etched on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside your golden door!"

Forgiving him his personal failures, his career in the U.S. Senate spanned almost five decades and soared in its accomplishments. He spoke and acted compassionately. His handprints mark the page of nearly every important bill on civil rights, disability rights, and education. A world without Ted Kennedy would be a very different world.

The poetry of his passing doesn't elude me. We live in a charged time right now. The time we live in will be a time frequently replayed in the future--much like the 60's, a time of change. With different players. Different causes. If you pay attention, you'll notice--the energy and the intensity of right now is palpable. I believe this time period will mesmerize my unborn granddaughter.

It's different now than it was back then, it's true. But there's mirrors all over, peeking into a similar time. It seems to me, if I drew out lines and conclusions, that Ted Kennedy's passing was timed like a metronome.

Kennedy helped usher in the Civil Rights Act in 1964, a bill that delineated such basic rights for black people in America as to where they were "allowed" to eat and drink. Now, the year of his death, Americans voted into the highest office, the first black president. And with him, the compassion and genius of his message--we will speak honestly and with empathy in mind. We're going to do our best. It's been so long, the soul sighs to hear it. Kennedy probably did too.

I think I glimpsed a tiny little bit of what his life must have been made of while I worked during the 2008 election. I worked harder on that campaign than any job in my life. The energy in those offices was euphoric and endless. Thick and raw. We fight, I thought to myself, with our nails and our tears.

Sadly, we're polarized as a nation as never before. Change rumbles in the distance. And now too. It's storming out. Only time and perspective can show us the overview.

For now, I know, it is the end of something. Something I can't quite put my finger on it. The world is left with her yearning. We'll claw to build bridges as other men tear them down. We'll wake up next to our beloveds, as others carry their beloveds to rest. As a country, our fallen icons etch their songs and their ideas into our collective subconscious.

And the beat goes on...