I’m of two minds about having more people read my stuff because when you realize there’s “someone out there” the writer has tendency to write either to offend or not to offend. I’m not trying to do either. Yesterday’s post reached more people than anything I’ve written so far, which is almost galling because I put hardly any effort into it. It was a cri de coeur meant satirically, in the manner of a Modest Proposal. I wasn’t serious. I don’t really want England to die anymore than Swift wanted Irish babies to be stewed. I want all of us to face our problems, get up off our asses, and solve them. OK?
Yesterday I had to do an errand in the Grand Central Station area. Afterward, I decided to wander around and as I did, I thought of Patrick Kennedy.
You don’t remember Patrick Kennedy, do you?
He was born on August 7, 1963 and died 39 hours later. A White House baby! I don’t remember the excitement over Jackie’s pregnancy and the joy of his birth. What I do remember is his death. Of course, at age eight years and four days I didn’t understand the medical issues. But I remember my parents’ reactions: sympathy, sadness, and resignation as in “these things happen.” (The link below gives a horrifying statistic: 25,000 babies a year were lost to RDS.)
The tragedy passed. The media didn’t pound things into the pavement in those days, and there wasn’t an X (or a Substack) to note snidely that Mrs. Kennedy was a heavy smoker1 or that JFK’s first question to the doctors was “Will he be retarded?”
Today if Patrick Kennedy is remembered it’s because of the medical significance. Patrick’s death spurred changes in medical care of newborns. It’s too bad that it takes a high-born death to do this, but that’s the way things are.
Why the death of Patrick Kennedy came to me yesterday, I don’t know. I usually think of it around my birthday, August 5, and forget about it.
But for whatever reason, this thought decided to lurk around in my unconscious until yesterday, September 11.
Then I came home and turned to my bad habit, Twitter X, and I saw this:
A little less than four months later, still in mourning for Patrick, her husband’s brains were blown out right next to her.
No one ever talks about Patrick’s death coming so soon before JFK’s. I didn’t see that movie with Natalie Portman. I wonder if the movie mentioned it at all.
Shattered by Patrick’s death, she was shattered again four months later.
I can’t. Can you?
I always wonder if “something is out there” when things like that happen.
In 1987, I woke up and dressed all in black. That wasn’t a “thing” then so it looked weird. Everything: black. Even underwear and jewelry. Black necklace, black earrings.
Around 12 noon the image of my dead grandmother’s face in her casket came to me. Around 2 PM, I went to the student lounge and ran into the resident smartass.
“So Diana, who are you in mourning for?” He cracked.
“Get lost,” I smiled, and went back to trying and failing to study.
That night I got a call from a neighbor. My father had died that day, around 2 PM.
Years later I told an ex-prof this story. He was a quasi-Marxist and a total materialist. I asked him whether he thought there was “something out there.”
“I can’t prove it, but for my money, yes.”
Same with me. I can’t prove it either but…
For my money, yes.
A Kennedy Baby’s Life and Death
Compare the primitiveness of 1963 with modern NICU medicine.
My friends, it is not true that before the 1970s people were unaware of the health consequences of smoking. My father told me that when he was a kid in the 1920 cigs were called “coffin nails.”
I was born into an Irish Catholic clan, the McLaughlin's. My father, a Clayton, married into it. One of the McLaughlin women, Aunt Mary, had about ten children. Half of them did not make it to their forties. Lots of mental health issues, retardation, poor diet. Uncle John was a working alcoholic. We had two of them. Big families were the norm, as Catholics who did not use birth control. there were two Downs Syndrome babies, one child who was 'odd,' and put in a 'home.' He was probably autistic, but in the early fifties I don't believe they had a term for that yet. One of my brothers was retarded. He recently died at the age of 68.
Growing up, there were always what we now call 'special needs' children. We were a crude lot and so they were called a lot of things and 'special' wasn't one of them. But, they were generally treated kindly, if you believe, as we used to chant as children, "Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me."
Your piece is very evocative. Thank you for this.
I’m willing to guess Jackie had Placenta Abruptia which is due to smoking. My hubby’s mother was a heavy smoker and lost two full term babies before my hubby was born. She had Placenta Abruptia. Hubby was a scheduled C section. This was in 1961.