We hate talking about it. We fear saying something awkward or intrusive. We think we'll only make it worse by acknowledging it, so we fall silent.
"I think, in large part," Kathleen Kennedy Townsend says, "we don't have a culture that knows how to deal with death."
Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, is, of course, sadly expert on the subject of death. When she was 12, her uncle was killed; when she was 16, her father. That these intimates were President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is something that is a well-known part of her biography, if not necessarily something that she speaks extensively about in public.
But tomorrow, Townsend is scheduled to speak at Sol Levinson & Brothers funeral home in Pikesville, which for the past 10 years has hosted a lecture series on death, dying and bereavement as a memorial to one of its partners, Irvin B. Levinson, who died in 1998.
Her speech is titled "The Awful Grace of God: How I Search for Wisdom in the Face of Death." The reference is to one of the most extraordinary moments in modern American politics, the evening of April 4, 1968, when her father, carrying on with a previously scheduled campaign event in Indianapolis, announced to a mostly black crowd that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.
As the crowd gasped in shock, and with other cities on the verge of erupting in rioting, Kennedy soothed his audience, calling for unity and compassion rather than divisiveness and hatred, remembering his own emotions after his brother's assassination and quoting a favorite passage from Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
Two months later, Robert Kennedy would be dead, felled by an assassin himself. For many, that would also be the day when what RFK stood for - an end to the Vietnam War, racial reconciliation on the home front - would also die.
But for his oldest daughter Kathleen, who surely had more to despair than the rest of us, it was instead a day to begin the path toward that wisdom her father spoke about. Maybe not immediately, but eventually.
"It takes time to absorb all these lessons," says Townsend, now 56.
