On Friday morning, September 16, 2011, Patrick Kennedy wolfed down a big breakfast of eggs, pancakes, and bacon in his hotel room at the Four Seasons in Washington while speaking to Amy on the telephone. He was in town for a political rally, and he and his wife were making plans for the next day; Amy would be arriving in the morning and they would have dinner with Kara at about five. “Cool,” Patrick said, “see you then.”
Patrick was looking forward to seeing his sister especially since he and Amy were expecting, just as he hoped they’d be by this time. He planned to break the news to Kara over dinner. Amy thought it was maybe a little too early, though. After all, she was just six weeks along and was worried about jinxing things. No, Patrick decided, he was too happy to keep the news to himself. Because Kara had been the first Kennedy to whom he’d introduced Amy, he felt she had a vested interested in their happiness; he wanted her to be the first to hear the good news. “And besides,” he said, “I don’t believe in jinxes.”
A couple of hours later, Patrick was sitting at a desk in his room and preparing a speech when the phone rang. It was his former chief of staff, Sean Richardson. He said that Kelly O’Donnell from NBC News had just called him to ask him to confirm some terrible news. “They found Kara,” Richardson said, his voice shaking. “She was in a steam room at her health club. They think she’d just done some laps, and … I don’t know … they found her, Pat! They found her.”
Patrick didn’t understand. “What do you mean, they found her?” he asked, his panic rising.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Sean said. He didn’t have to finish.
All Patrick could manage to ask was: “How?”
Kara was only fifty-one. It was sudden. She’d had a heart attack after working out. Later it would be thought that unbeknownst to them all, the chemotherapy she’d undergone to treat her cancer had damaged her heart. It was hard to believe. No one even had a chance to say goodbye to her, but as the Kennedys well knew, life doesn’t always provide the perfect cinematic goodbye.
Sobbing, Patrick hung up and called Amy to give her the terrible news. He also called Teddy, who said he would call Joan. Then quick calls were made to as many of Kara’s loved ones as could be reached: Caroline in New York, Maria in Los Angeles, Kennedys, Shrivers, Smiths, and Lawfords all over the country. “After everything she’d been through, it seemed impossible,” Patrick recalled. “She was in such great shape and always had an amazing attitude about life. You just couldn’t imagine that this could happen.”
Patrick knew what he had to do: he had to go to Kara’s home to be with Grace, who was about to turn seventeen, and Max, fourteen. He’d spend the afternoon with them and the hours into the night, telling them heartwarming stories about their courageous mother and who she’d been in his life and in the lives of everyone she’d touched. Her bravery, her spirit … her love of family; he wanted to remind Kara’s children of all of it. He understood from his own personal experience with loss that it would be these precious memories that would sustain them during the dark days ahead. “I had this profound sense that I had to honor Kara in the way I acted during those first twelve hours,” Patrick would recall. “And I just kept thinking, I can’t do what was often done with us—talk about other things and ignore all the elephants in the room. I had to tell them the truth. Kara would have wanted me to do that for her, and for them.”
Of course, losing Kara so suddenly was devastating to everyone. For her part, Ethel thanked God Ted wasn’t alive to have to bear it; she didn’t think he would have been able to do so. Sister Pauline Joseph recalled, “I was actually in the room with Mrs. Kennedy at Hickory Hill when she heard about Kara the day after it happened. I’m not positive, but I think it was Teddy Jr. who called with the news. I heard her chastise him and ask, ‘But why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ And from what she later told me, he said he didn’t know why, he just wanted to wait. He thought maybe it was because he envied the fact that she didn’t know about it, and he wanted that to remain the case for a little while longer. As soon as she hung up, she looked at me and said, ‘I have to call Joansie.’ I thought to myself, How terrible is it that these two women of Camelot had to come together again in the face of yet another great and sudden tragedy?”
Just imagine the trials Ethel had watched her bear since the day Joan Bennett joined the Kennedy family more than fifty years earlier: her difficult marriage to Ted, through her alcoholism, her miscarriages (one suffered immediately after the ordeal of Chappaquiddick), her bipolar disorder, and everything else she endured, all of it winding toward this terrible time in her life that would find her burying her only daughter. “I also heard Mrs. Kennedy’s side of that conversation,” recalled the nun. “After she expressed her condolences, she told Joan, ‘We were given eight more years with Kara. How blessed we all were, Joansie. How truly blessed.’ She noted that Max was just six when Kara was diagnosed [with cancer], and Grace was eight. Now Max was fourteen and Grace sixteen. ‘Thank God Kara had those eight years to raise them,’ Mrs. Kennedy said, ‘and thank God those kids now have those precious memories with their mom.’”
Observing Joan at Kara’s funeral at Holy Trinity Church in Washington—so small and weak in her black turtleneck sweater and pantsuit, her hair still long and golden—most people did have to wonder how she would ever survive Kara’s death. She was so shattered and numb, Patrick and Teddy had to help her as she slowly made her way into the church.
As Kara’s best friends, Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, sat with their families during the service, Teddy recalled that he and his sister had collaborated on their father’s reelection campaign back in 1988. Kara’s responsibility, he said, was public relations. He said that when poll numbers began to drop, some urged the senator to “go negative.” However, Kara strongly disagreed. “She implored Dad to emphasize instead his primary strengths, which were his compassion and his willingness to fight for what he believed in, things that even his political opponents would agree with,” Teddy said. “She reminded him why he was in political life.” Their father would end up winning that election by his largest-ever margin and, said Teddy, “our father always credited Kara for that win.”
After the Mass, on the way out while following the casket, Max and Grace literally had to hold their grandmother up; she was too weak and overwrought to stand on her own. True to her nature, though, Joan would somehow rebound. About a half hour later, she would hold court in the parking lot while surrounded by people who just wanted to be near her, to comfort her, and to express their sorrow. Their love seemed to lift her. Soon, she was reminiscing, talking about Kara’s wedding to Michael Allen back in 1990.
Joan recalled that as she and Kara planned the big day, Kara told her she wanted a black gospel choir to sing during the ceremony. This was dismaying, she said, because she’d always imagined a lovely string quartet playing Mozart at her daughter’s wedding. However, Kara’s mind was made up about it; she wanted gospel music. “I was so determined that she have the wedding of her dreams, I spent months going to black churches all over the city trying to understand gospel,” Joan recalled in an animated way; she seemed to be relishing the telling of the story. “Finally, I found just the right choir at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, one of the oldest Baptist churches in the country,” she said. “They were thirteen of the best gospel singers ever and, believe you me, when Kara got married nothing like this had ever been heard at Our Lady of Victory. Are you kidding me? This was something for the ages.”
As Joan Kennedy smiled, she concluded, “Kara was so proud of me that day. She really was. And I was proud of her, too.”