Maybe because I was born and raised in Boston..

 

and heard the name Kennedy since I was a child that another unbearable tragedy, the death of John F. Kennedy's granddaughter, Tatiana, so moved me.

I followed John F. Kennedy's exciting candidacy for the presidency as a young teen, thrilled to think a young, handsome U.S. senator from my state could become president. I remember a classmate who supported Nixon's candidacy and I kept up a friendly competition to see whose chosen candidate would win -- we were both too young to vote. When JFK won, my family and I were thrilled. I'd been used to seeing Dwight D. Eisenhower as a young child on television, and thought only old men could be presidents, but now JFK would make US history as the youngest president ever elected. 

The brief Kennedy years were an exciting time for us Bostonians, and I followed his presidency the way other young teens followed movie stars in the then popular Hollywood gossip magazine, Photoplay.

Then unimagined tragedy hit us all in the gut on November 22, 1963, when our beloved JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  In my mind, I can still see that famous photo of Mrs. Kennedy and her two young children, Caroline and John, standing on the steps of the White House waiting for President Kennedy's funeral procession to arrive.  My parents, my brother, and I wept as we watched the horse-drawn caisson carry his casket to Arlington Cemetery to be placed beneath the Eternal Flame.

As the years passed, we watched Caroline and John grow into fine young adults. But tragedy was never far away. Our former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,  passed away in 1994 at the young age of 64, and five years later, the unthinkable happed again when John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were killed when his plane went down off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in July of 1999.

And now, the unendurable news of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's daughter and JFK's granddaughter's passing at the age of 35, leaving behind her husband, George, her 3-year-old son, and her 1-year-old daughter, her father, Edwin, her sister, Rose, and her brother, Jack.

We mourn with them in the loss of this intelligent, accomplished, beautiful, gentle woman.

Her passing reminded me of how far back my family appreciated and supported her grandfather, John F. Kennedy. We found this letter from him to my father after my father passed away.  I treasure it:

“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.” ― Aeschylus