In early 2004, much of the Shriver family was excited by an upcoming visit to the compound by Archbishop Sean Patrick O’Malley. A longtime friend of Eunice—and before her, Rose—O’Malley had earlier been stationed in Palm Beach, Florida, and was a regular guest of the family’s when they were in residence at their estate there. Many of the Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smiths gathered at the Cape for Father O’Malley’s visit in January 2004. According to the plan, he would celebrate Mass at ten sharp on his first Sunday there. After the service, another Mass would be said at Ted and Vicki’s. Then there’d be a brunch at Eunice and Sarge’s. Afterward, they would all converge on the Shrivers’ veranda with Bloody Marys.
One plan for Father O’Malley’s visit was for Ted and his sons—Patrick and Teddy—as well as Sargent and his sons—Bobby, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony—to take O’Malley out on the Senator’s beloved schooner, Mya, to Nantucket. Maria and Arnold had already returned to Los Angeles after the holidays, and Kara—Ted’s daughter—was in Boston with her children. However, since it was freezing cold, Eunice didn’t want Sarge to go on the little jaunt. A small dispute regarding how many sweaters Sarge should wear ended up a loud, impassioned debate. O’Malley was so surprised by Sarge and Eunice’s outburst, he had to ask if they were all right. No, Ethel said, things were definitely not okay with the Shrivers. She said Sarge had been slipping for the last few years.
At first it was difficult to be sure of what was happening to Sarge. He would forget people’s names, repeat himself in conversation, and seem disoriented. Eunice blamed it on “old age,” as did Ted and Ethel. Finally, in the middle of 2000, Sarge was diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. “You hear it but you don’t really believe it,” said Timothy. “Then you hear it again, and it sinks in a little, but still you don’t get it. When you finally do accept it, it feels like the end of everything as you have known it.”
Maria, in particular, wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis meant and how to handle it. Like her mother, she was ready to make lists, to have an agenda, to tackle it and make sense of it. She quickly realized it wasn’t possible, though. “Once you see one case of Alzheimer’s, you’ve seen … one case of Alzheimer’s,” a doctor told her. There was no way to predict how it would unfold for Sarge, and there was nothing anyone could do but pray.
True to his nature, Sarge wanted to maintain his schedule for as long as possible. A few weeks after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he and Eunice were off to Ireland, the family’s homeland, for the first Special Olympics World Summer Games ever to be held overseas. As Eunice stood onstage holding hands with Nelson Mandela, who officially opened the games, at historic Croke Park in front of sixty-five thousand cheering people, Sarge stood on the sidelines and beamed. It was as if nothing could slow these two down. The next day, Sarge gave a stirring speech to the Special Olympics board of directors at Dublin Castle. “It would be his last appearance at the Olympics, but he went out with a bang,” said Mark Shriver. “We all marveled at his ability to rise above … to be the man he had always been even though there was this … thing … Alzheimer’s going on in the background.”
By the beginning of 2004, Sarge’s condition had gotten much worse. At eighty-eight, he was older than all those in the old guard—seventeen years older than Ted, who was seventy-two. Now he had slowed down to the point where it had actually become heartbreaking for his children to watch. After all, Sarge had been one of the great minds of President Kennedy’s New Frontier, well loved by almost everyone in government, regarded as “a good man,” which is what President Bill Clinton would call him, in a world of politics where there weren’t many left.
Determined not to let it all get to her, Eunice continued to insist on enlisting Sarge in dinner conversation when the children and their children came to visit. “What do you think, Sargie?” she would ask when someone made a point. “And how do you feel about that, Sargie?” she would wonder when someone else had an idea. She would not let the man she’d loved for more than fifty years slip away, not on her watch, anyway.
All four Shriver sons were present for the visit of Archbishop O’Malley, as were their wives and children. “After Mass, the boys—I call them boys, but they were all obviously grown men—sat down with the archbishop to pray privately,” recalled a priest who had accompanied O’Malley on the trip. “Later I spoke to Mark, who was having a crisis of conscious about his father.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” said Mark Shriver with tears in his eyes to the priest. “This isn’t Dad,” he said, pointing to Sarge sitting in front of the fireplace, vacancy in his eyes. “So many people say you end up becoming a parent to your parents,” he observed. “That notion falls far short of the truth for me. A parent can control a five-year-old. But I can’t control anything about my dad, least of all what’s happening to him.”
“But you must have faith,” said the priest. “God is with your dad, wherever he is in his own mind in this moment. Look at him. He’s safe and happy in his own world, Mark.”
The two peered at Sarge, who smiled back at them from across the room.
Mark knew his cousins—Kara, Teddy, and Patrick—had been dealing with a failing parent, his aunt Joan, for many years. Now he, too, faced a different kind of debilitation in a beloved parent. “I know it’s called growing up,” he concluded, “but I have to confess, Father, it’s been a long time since I had much hope.”
The priest shook his head. “You need faith, Mark. Not hope. Faith.” The rest of 2004 would remain challenging for the Shrivers as Sarge’s disease continued to take its natural course. However, as Eunice liked to say, “The sun comes up every morning. No matter what, every morning it comes up.”
At the beginning of the new year—on February 18, 2005—the family grew just a tad bigger when Mark and Jeanne Shriver welcomed little Emma Rose Shriver to their fold. Pretty much nothing could compare to the moment when Mark handed Emma to her grandfather to hold for the first time. “This is life,” Eunice said as she watched her husband gently cradle his new granddaughter. “It goes on, doesn’t it, Sargie?” she asked him.
Gazing down at his granddaughter with tears in his eyes, Sarge nodded. “Change is the law of life,” he said softly, almost trance-like. “And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” Eunice looked at her husband with amazement. It was just a line, but he had quoted her brother President Kennedy … and it was perfect.