Still a Kennedy
Joan’s life after Ted has been as storied and volatile as any other divorcée’s. Granted, hers has been more in the public eye than most. The Kennedy name, and its associations with a glamorous moment in the national memory, are not easily shaken off and don’t disappear with the finalization of a divorce. But her youngest son Patrick says the public quality of Joan’s struggle has been more blessing than curse for millions of people. “She didn’t pick being a silent warrior for recognition of mental health and addiction, but she was that face for a generation of people who didn’t talk about these issues the way they talk about them today,” he says. “She knows it’s real and she’s made a huge difference in so many people’s lives who come up to her on a daily basis and thank her for giving them a sense that they weren’t alone.”
Joan “had a number of good years when she and my dad were separated,” he continued. After the divorce, both parents made extra efforts to spend time with each child alone, to make sure they knew how important they were. “My mom took me overseas on a number of trips,” Patrick recalls. “She took me to the Holy Land, throughout Israel, to Masada. We went to midnight mass in Bethlehem. We stopped at Rome and went to St. Peter’s, visited all the churches. In London, there were more churches and castles.” While Ted focused on more physical activities—fishing, camping, and sailing—Joan exposed her children to culture and traveling.
Her valleys have been many. In 1988, with several drunken-driving arrests under her belt already, she crashed her car into a fence and lost her license for forty-five days. Three years later, she was arrested for drinking vodka straight from the bottle while weaving as she drove her car. Then, in the spring of 2005, a passerby spotted a blonde woman sprawled on a sidewalk on Boston’s Beacon Street. A streak of blood ran down the woman’s face as she tried to hoist herself up. The passerby, Constance Bacon, didn’t learn that the woman she was helping was Joan Kennedy until the next day. “She was conscious,” Bacon said. “She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and tried to get up and she couldn’t. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who it was, that it was anything special.” Though Joan didn’t appear drunk to Bacon, family friends told reporters that she tested well above the legal limit and had taken to secretly drinking mouthwash and vanilla extract. Her street fall—which left her with a concussion and broken shoulder—made headlines again, and Patrick, by then a member of the US House of Representatives, decided he’d shelve the United State Senate run he’d been considering so that he could join his siblings in helping their mother. After a brief-but-publicized legal struggle, the children reached an agreement with Joan: Two financial professionals would watch over her estimated $9.5 million in assets while a guardian would monitor her and guide her medical decisions. The agreement stipulated that if Joan abused alcohol or endangered herself again, more control would be shifted away from her. Any rift caused by the legal proceedings had been long repaired by 2009, when Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer in the Hyannis Port home his family had owned since the 1920s. His new wife, Vicki, was by his side, as were his children. Joan quietly attended his funeral, her presence evoking a quarter-century of his life—both the highs of the long-lost Camelot days and the lows of two assassinations, a near-fatal plane crash, a son’s battle with cancer, and a political life nearly derailed.
In 2011, her daughter, Kara, died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty-one while working out in her Washington, DC, gym. She’d survived lung cancer a decade earlier, despite having been initially told that the illness was inoperable. Ted stepped in and helped her find a surgeon, who removed part of her right lung. The surgery was followed by aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that might have weakened her heart.
For Patrick, so much of his childhood was spent watching his mother struggle. It meant she wasn’t always there for him and his siblings, despite her best intentions and efforts. “Her disease sidelined her in a pretty fundamental way,” he says. “She did everything she could given the circumstances. This is a powerful disease.” But whatever weaknesses she had as a mother, she’s worked hard to make up for them as a grandmother. “It is great to have a second chance with her, so to speak,” says Patrick, who married schoolteacher Amy Petitgout in 2011. Amy had a daughter from a previous marriage, and she and Patrick had two more children, one in 2012 and one in 2013. Stepdaughter Harper is so enamored with Joan that she gave her a treasured gift—her favorite stuffed animal. “I was aghast that she would part with this pink seal,” Patrick recalls. “My mom put it right on the top of her bed. She has it there all the time, not just when we come over. It clearly means something to her. Having my mother back to dote on my babies is great, and they love her.”