By July 2011, Kara Kennedy’s cancer had been in remission for eight years. Doctors now considered her cured, as did she and her family. It was a true miracle, and no one in the family would ever take it for granted.
Though Kara had dated a few men after her divorce from Michael Allen, she’d never really been romantically interested in any of them. Was it because of the way she saw her father treat her mother? The suggestion was often made by friends. She didn’t know if she’d been affected by her parents’ bad marriage, and she didn’t feel compelled to figure it out, either. Instead, in addition to raising her children, she spent time addressing some of the root problems in her relationship with Joan. Feeling blessed to even draw breath, she couldn’t imagine holding on to old grudges about the past, especially relating to the way she was raised. As a mother herself, Kara had come to understand that Joan had done the best she could under the circumstances of her life at the time. In recent years, Kara had spent many of her summers with her children and Joan at Squaw Island. Mother and daughter would take daily long walks on the beach and try to deepen their understanding of each other, especially now that Ted was gone. “I was so mad at her for so many years,” Kara said at the time, “for me to continue to try to rescue my relationship with my mom is so important to me.”
Joan was actually a lot better; she wasn’t drinking, anyway. She had her good days and her bad. Her bipolar medication tended to make her unpredictable; Kara knew she had to give her latitude and not take anything she said in a moment of anger too personally. Ted’s death had been particularly hard on Joan. She’d never been able to reconcile their relationship; there’d just been too much history. In a perfect world, they would have had that one great talk that would have helped them come to terms with all their bad history. However, Joan knew that Ted had lost patience with her a long time ago, and it broke her heart. “But all of your other relatives are just as screwed up as I am,” she once told him. “How come you’re okay with them, but not with me?”
On July 15, the Kennedys came together for the wedding of Kara’s brother Patrick to a thirty-six-year-old sixth-grade history teacher named Amy Petitgout. Finally, he was getting married; everyone in his life was elated. Now that he was out of public office, Patrick’s story had taken a decidedly better turn, especially when he met and fell in love with Amy. Married previously, she had a daughter, Harper, who was three. The couple met back in March 2010 at a fund-raiser in Atlantic City. “He was tired,” Amy says of Patrick of the time they first encountered each other, “and really emotional. Not a regular guy. He didn’t sleep well, and he talked a lot about his dad. It was a big departure for me, because, well, my last relationship was not very much about feelings. I liked that kind of openness.”
With his addictions now at long last under control, Patrick was a completely different man. “We’re relying on AA and a totally different lifestyle,” Amy told the writer Stephen Fried. “And,” she said, smiling, “I’m nice to him all the time.”
The couple was wed on the beach at the compound. It was sad, though, that relatives didn’t show up as they once had for big events such as a Kennedy wedding. Caroline, who was never really one for these sorts of family events anyway, wasn’t present and neither was Maria Shriver. Kara admitted to being a little disappointed; she missed her best friends, but she understood that things had changed and that people had moved on with their own lives. Still, plenty of family members were present, such as Ethel’s offspring: Kerry, Chris, and Max, as well as Bobby Jr. and Cheryl Hines, and Rory Kennedy and her husband, Mark Bailey. There were also Anthony, Tim, and Bobby Shriver. Vicki, Ted’s widow, was present, of course, as well as her two children.
“My mother, Joan, and my aunts, Ethel and Jean, are spending a lot of time playing with their great-grandchildren all around them,” Patrick—tall as ever, still red-haired and still freckled—told the media that had assembled just outside the gates. “I feel like my dad’s orchestrating everything from up above and that he’s doing a great job and he’s telling us to get out on his sailboat and enjoy the ocean like he always did. My brother, Teddy, is my best man, which makes the day even better for me.”
“Okay. See you in September, kid,” Patrick told Kara as he kissed her goodbye at the end of a long, memorable day. He noted that he and Amy would soon visit her in Washington, “and, who knows? We may even have some good news,” he added, winking. Kara knew that her brother and his new wife were trying to get pregnant. “You can do it, Pat,” she told him as she playfully chucked him under the chin. “I have faith in you.”
A week after the wedding, Joan and Kara were spotted browsing a village antique shop in the center of town. “She’s my best friend,” Joan said of her daughter to this reporter, who happened upon them while on a research mission in Hyannis Port. Though Joan, at seventy-three, appeared small and frail, she still had the great smile of her youth. Her blond hair was piled under a baseball cap and she was wearing large aviator sunglasses. “We do everything together,” she added, beaming at Kara.
Gazing at her mother, Kara handed her a small trinket. “Mom, look at this little diamond elf,” she said. “What does this remind you of?”
Joan examined Kara’s offering. “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed. She said it looked exactly like a doll she and Ted had given Kara for Christmas years ago when Kara was about ten. “I always called you my little elf,” Joan said. “Daddy found that doll in Alaska.”
Kara smiled at the memory. “Oh, how I loved that doll,” she told me. “I’ve always wondered what happened to it.”
Joan smiled. “It’s in the attic at home,” she told Kara. “I still have it. I’d never throw it out. Never.”
Turning to her mother, Kara made a decision: “You know what? I’m going to buy this for you,” she said. She then handed the piece of jewelry to the store clerk to ring it up. “Would you like a box?” the cashier asked. No, Kara said. She then took the trinket and carefully pinned it to Joan’s lapel.
Joan took a step back. “How does it look?” she asked.
Kara sized up her mother. “Perfect,” she said. “Just perfect.”