Edward M. Kennedy, R.I.P.

I didn't want to break any news here regarding the death of the man being called the "last liberal lion." Better writers than I were being called toward eulogy. I was awake at the moment the news broke, though, and saw the first reports.

I didn't like thinking about it, to tell you the truth. We knew it was coming but I just wanted some quiet.

I remember him and his brothers better than I'd like to.

Maybe my earliest memory is from my mother shrieking from the network news of his brother John's assassination while I played at a coffee table with my recent birthday toys. Had she not screamed, I doubt that I would have remembered the moment.

When his other brother was killed, I remember a friend of mine telling me on the school bus that "Kennedy was killed." I almost spit at him that we all knew that. He had been murdered years ago, I said. "No, Bobby was killed last night." My little friend's words shocked me about as much as my mother's scream and buried the memory in my brain almost as much if not more.

That same school bus had taken us both to the same place on an earlier morning that year after Martin Luther King's assassination. The nuns in that Indianapolis school didn't know what to do with us that morning, especially considering RFK's speech from the hood of a car or back of a pickup late the night before in our little city. Despite having only one or two Black students among some 500, their fear was palpable even to me during a time when authoritarian-types didn't show fear. They just maintained their main mission of keeping us out of our parents' hair for that fateful day and hoped for the best.

Teddy's thing with Chappaquiddick and his later defeat in the primaries at the hand of Jimmy Carter didn't have the same voltage as we grew older but, as we grew even older, his status as the last of the New Deal Democrats started to burnish.

I paraphrased his words from Bobby's funeral to garner support for Democrats Abroad here during the dark days of the GWB attempt at tyranny, him reminding us all that none of us need be idealized, or enlarged beyond what we are in life but simply to be remembered as good and decent people, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

When I saw him at the Democratic National Convention in Denver about a year ago today, it really made me pause. He was in his element and among his own. We knew that he couldn't possibly last forever and, I think, that almost every person there, supporters all, had the feeling that we were witnessing him in-person for last time in our own lives.

From Argentina, I watch an America unfold that is so different from his era and my own. Like the oft-told story of the young boy that questioned his backwoods father whom he found crying on the day that FDR died and was told, "because my friend died today", I have emotions that are not easily expressed other than by tears and for reasons I cannot easily explain given the separation of our lives and years.

Liberalism and the hope that it gives us through every dark epoch probably explains it best. It's good to be here with friends both when we win and when we lose.