The Weight of Age
by Connie Stetson of Fifty Is The New
With the passing of Teddy Kennedy, aside from feeling real grief at his loss, I am feeling, profoundly, the weight of my age. Not my chronological age, I just turned 58, but the age that has shaped my sensibilities, the age I am passing through. As I write this I feel like a trauma survivor, as though I’m watching my life pass before my eyes.
The year of my birth, 1951, Harry S. Truman was president, and then Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1956. The first presidential election I can remember was between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. It was as hotly contested in our family as it was in the nation. My grandparents were staunch Republicans, supporting Nixon, and my mother was a Democrat, mad about Kennedy.
That first televised debate, Sept. 26th, 1960, at nine years old, made me a life-long Democrat. Those impossibly handsome brothers, Jack, Bobby and Teddy, whose passions fueled the passion of a generation, were the real standard bearers of hope and change, the very words I am sick to death of hearing politicians spew now.
It was late November in 1963, I was in my Home Ec. class (which was mandatory for girls then), anticipating the Thanksgiving holiday long weekend, when our school principal announced that Kennedy had been shot in a motorcade in Dallas. All of us in that generation remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard that horrifying announcement. Time stood still. As I look back, I see that that moment was the harbinger of worse to come, ushering in a decade of grief, loss, pain, and wrenching social change.
Less than five years later on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was wrenched, terribly, out of this world on that balcony in Memphis, and two months later, as I sat up with my mom a little after midnight, to watch on TV Bobby’s victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, we witnessed in shock and horror, in tears and disbelief, our hope and energy and optimism, murdered along with Robert Kennedy. And in 1969, just a little more than a year after his brother was assassinated, Teddy Kennedy drove his car off that bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing Mary Jo Kopechne, and ending any possibility that “Camelot” could ever be reclaimed.
I feel it bearing down, the weight of my age, all of it—Viet Nam, women’s equality (gee—will I live to see that happen?), the civil rights movement, in which we are still engaged with gay and lesbian rights at the forefront, health care for all of us, and not just for those who can pay, 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the purposeful degrading of our environment, the conscious undoing of our economy, our deep racist bent, world poverty and hunger, AIDS, cynicism, and worst of all, the irretrievable corporate corruption of our political system. I feel like such a fucking sell-out.
Meanwhile, I have mustered up some optimism for our current president. Barack Obama is, after all, living proof that we can evolve, fix what is broken, and stand for what is right. It has never been more critical for our country to regain its courage, its self-respect, and its desire to never lose heart. Life is long and we ain’t dead yet, right?
I do hope with all my heart that at the end of his life, with the entire good that Senator Ted Kennedy accomplished, that he felt balanced out. That the weight of his age tipped the scales towards what he accomplished in his whole lifetime, and not towards what he may have had to live down in that one awful moment. I hope that that is true for us all.
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