“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, he had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…”
– Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on RFK
Words are never adequate to lift the pain people feel at times of loss. As we survey the carnage of our ongoing pandemic, I reread Robert Kennedy’s story, in try to learn again of a way out of the abyss we have collectively experienced. RFK did not have the benefit of his own example to draw upon. But through his life, we can see how his journey can teach us how to survive a disaster and take away a deeper and stronger faith.
From existentialists like Albert Camus, he found the knowledge we each have an inescapable destiny. He learned we each have a responsibility to define our best selves. From reading Edith Hamilton’s work The Greek Way, he learned of the Greek ethos of man against fate. He came to believe that man, redefines himself by his choices each and every day. In the final analysis, life was a sequence of risks. To leave them unmet through fear was to simply destroy one’s self.
It’s always so very hard to journey through mazes of pain, but each other's stories can bring other sufferers insight and hope. Robert Kennedy became the head of a great political family through an unspeakable tragedy in the glare of the world's attention. Suddenly he was accountable only to himself. Ironically the qualities he had subordinated in the interest of his family, now rose to the surface. His concern, gentleness, idealism, under the alleged “ruthlessness”, rose freely to the surface. He became the person remembered as a champion of compassion today.
Aeschylus wrote of ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ and that ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ The mysteries of suffering underlie life. RFK’s great speech on the night of Dr. King’s death epitomized his journey after Dallas. Little did we know what lay ahead two months later.
“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Robert Kennedy also understood Herodotus: “Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.”
Though we search for comfort in other religions or philosophic traditions, that quest does not make us less faithful to our faith. In RFK’s case, Catholic teaching did not provide what he needed. The tragedy of necessity usually has defeated the tragedy of unmet possibilities. It’s the difference between saying, “What a pity it had to be this way,” rather than the more unrealistic, “What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.”
Calamity happens without reason. Some believe there is nothing in the universe that happens without reason. For others, tragedy seems yet another expression of what a chance event or occurrence can do in the world. For those who believe in a universe infused by a deity with some purpose, tragedy represents dual crises, both philosophical and emotional. In those cases, we are forced to come to terms with death and loss before we can truly resume our own existence.
In our darkest times, we each struggle with a fundamental question. Is there any sense to the universe? Faith claims there is. Experience brings that terrible doubt. If we live in the belief there is a universe of pattern and purpose, what purpose can the premature loss of a loved one serve, much less the loss of all our dreams. And we all ask the same questions Robert Kennedy asked after Dallas, “The innocent suffer— how can that be possible and God be just…?”
AFTERWORD
I have lost way more people than a person my age usually does or should. The last time that happened, somebody who I love approached me and said, "I was watching you today. I'm going to give you the same advice I give to my kids when they need it: it's time to remember “Breathe in and Breathe Out.” I didn't ask her to elaborate. I acknowledged the timeliness of her advice. She told me it was the sort of wisdom that comes with age, and she smiled and walked away. My throat tightened and my eyes pooled with tears. So there it was. I'd wondered where it was.
I had been kidding myself for years that the pain was stashed away in that place we hide "Yesterdays." Actually, it has been laying out there in the open forever. It’s that grieving that happens when grief is no longer the gaping open wound that is impossible to finesse. It happens after you have gotten through the aching, screaming pain, and when the good days seem to finally outnumber the bad once more. It's that stealth-like grief you never see coming and it arrives in ways not always recognizable.
It has happened to me only a few times, and it never coordinates with the times when I am missing someone. I dream of someone lost, in one of those dreams that when you awake, it is as if you’ve lost them all over again.
Though over time, my subconscious has become aware that each person has truly gone, which occasionally and imperfectly allows for an easier time when I wake up. One can learn to live with many things. Do not believe for a second we should ever be expected to totally "get over" it. Ever. All we can do is use the time left for us to do the best we can in living with it.
Though over time, my subconscious has become aware that each person has truly gone, which occasionally and imperfectly allows for an easier time when I wake up. One can learn to live with many things. Do not believe for a second we should ever be expected to totally "get over" it. Ever. All we can do is use the time left for us to do the best we can in living with it.
MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL
