(Written 26 July 1999. Published in the Neighborhood Journal. Posted 6 March 2003.)
For some reason, the tragic death
of JFK Jr. hit me kind of hard. I can’t
put a specific finger on why. After
all, I didn’t know him. So why should I
have any feelings at all about his death?
I think part of it has to do with the fact of his age. He was a thirty-something just like me. Hearing of the sudden death of a fellow thirty-something makes one’s own mortality more real. If it happened to JFK Jr., it could happen to me, too. Life can end in the blink of an eye. Literally.
Thinking of one’s mortality makes
one think about one’s life. If I were
to pass on today, would I have lived life to the fullest? Would I have experienced all I could have experienced? Did I take the chances, take the gamble,
when I needed to, or did I always play it safe at the expense of actually
living life?
There is more to it, however, than
coming to grips with my own mortality.
It has to do with the kind of person that John Jr. was. Humble.
Accepting. If anybody had a
reason to be mad at the world, he did.
His father was taken away from him before he even had a chance to know
him. He had no privacy; every failure
of his life was thrown out there for all the world to see. What person in their right mind would want
the world to know that they failed the bar, or that they had been mugged in
Central Park, or that they had a lover’s spat?
I know I wouldn’t. Yet, John Jr.
had no choice. This was his destiny,
like it or not. Through it all, he
didn’t complain. He accepted his
notoriety, his famousness, his “princehood”.
he did not run from his roots, or try to disguise who he was. He was a Kennedy, and proud to be a Kennedy.
At the same time, he did not throw
his fame in our face. He could have
easily used the Kennedy family influence to help him pass the bar; he
didn’t. He could have used his family
name to enter the political spectrum.
He didn’t. He could have used
his lineage in many other ways that many other children of wealth tend to
do. He didn’t. He was who he was. He knew who he was. He
was proud of who he was.
Can we say the same about
ourselves? Do we accept who we are, or
do we try to conform with how we think others want us to be? I know of many people who I can honestly say
I do not really know, as all I have ever seen is a facade of what they think
others want to see. This need to
display what we think others want to see is the saddest of all human tragedies,
the wasting of our precious selves, our uniqueness, what makes us us, as each
one of us is special and enriches the lives of those we come into contact
with. Only if we let our true selves
show.
When confronted with the tragedies
the have beset many of his family, including his father, JFK Junior replied
that he would much rather be daring and experience as much of life as he could
than cower and hide and wait for the inevitable lightning bolt to strike. And experience it he did. Posing nude in a magazine is an experience I
can confidently say I will never have.
Same goes for flying a plane. If
it were all to end right now, there is much that I have not experienced, and my
life is emptier because of it. However,
I have had many experiences that have enriched my life--I have lived in five
different states; I have been there at the birth of all four of my children; I
have run for political office; I’ve been a janitor. Have I lived life to the
fullest, or have I just plodded along the path that is expected of me? That is the question each and every one of
us must answer.
I never heard much about a John
Kennedy “charity du jour”, a “cause celebre”.
That’s not to say that he was not involved in giving back to the
community; he was. He just didn’t make
a big production about it. Can we say
that about ourselves? Are we humble, or are we always trying to throw in
others’ faces our greatness?
Off of Martha’s Vineyard, we lost
an incredible person, a role model of humility and dignity for an entire
generation. It is sad to lose such a
person; it would be much sadder if we fail to take up the legacy he has passed
to us.