At about four a.m on the morning of March 29, 2005, Patrick Kennedy was awakened by the relentless ringing of the telephone on his bed stand. At thirty-seven, he had been a respected Rhode Island congressman for the past ten years, responsible for much important legislation having to do with health care, a cause he and his father had championed for years. Recently, he’d finished an intensive thirty-day rehab stay at the Mayo Clinic. Upon his release, he gave an impassioned speech at the National Press Club relating to a report called “The State of Depression in America,” part of a larger effort to forge a public understanding of the mental-health parity bill to which he was dedicated. Patrick was still single, having thus far devoted his life completely to politics; he hadn’t dated in two years and also had no children.
“Hello. What is it?” Patrick asked as he tried to force himself awake.
It was Teddy, calling from his home in Connecticut. “Mom’s at Mass General,” he said. “They found her sprawled out on the sidewalk on Beacon Street. Bleeding. In the rain.”
“Holy shit. Who found her?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy answered. “Some Good Samaritan. You gotta go to her,” he concluded. “She needs you, Pat.”
After they spoke for a few more moments, Patrick agreed to go to Massachusetts General and see to Joan while Teddy promised to call Kara with the upsetting news.
Patrick hung up; he fell back onto his mattress, staring up at the ceiling for a long moment, his mind racing. At thirty-seven, he was now four years older than his mother had been back when she had her triumphant night at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. With the swift passing of the years, he had to wonder how things had gone so wrong.
“There had always been a special relationship between Patrick and Joan,” once noted Dun Gifford, who had worked for Ted in the 1960s and remained a good friend until his death in 2009. “Kara and Teddy knew it, too, often joking that Patrick was ‘Mom’s favorite.’ Joan would say he was the ‘sweetest of the three’ and would often recall a Christmas when he was about ten and felt badly that he didn’t have a present for her under the tree. He went into his bedroom on Christmas morning and carefully did his best to wrap one of his scarves in colorful paper, and then came back out and handed the clumsy offering to his mother. ‘It’s not much, Mommy,’ he said, ‘but since you bought it for me, I know you like it, so…’ It was a memory Joan cherished.”
Once Patrick got to the hospital, he found a tangle of reporters already on the scene. Looking exhausted, his eyes glazed and red-rimmed, he told them, “You want to make sure there’s someone there for her all the time, but at the same time you don’t want to encroach on her privacy too much. When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there’s someone with her twenty-four/seven, and perhaps that might become necessary.”
When he finally made his way to Joan’s room, Patrick found her lying in bed with a bandage on her forehead and a sling on her arm. It was heartbreaking. She looked terrible, very thin, her usually bouffant hair plastered down, her makeup streaked. Patrick lay next to her and spent the rest of the morning curled up at her side. He would say he couldn’t help but be reminded of all those times when he, as a little boy, was suffering from asthma and his mother would come into his room and slip under his sheets to comfort him.
In a few days, Patrick and his siblings would have to go to work to extend their guardianship over Joan. It was then that they would learn that she’d taken to secretly drinking again. Since, by court order, there was to be no liquor allowed in her household, apparently she was getting high on vanilla extract. It was just that bad. The Kennedys knew that something would have to be done, and soon.