c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The one time I met John F. Kennedy Jr., he said something that, like the flash-by view from a speeding train through an open window, let you see into the heart of his life.

His mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited several of my books. We were working together in her Fifth Avenue apartment on a fair June day on”Himself!”_ my biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. All business, except for her frequent laughter, stimulated as much by the low as by the high points of the book’s politics, she smoked cigarettes in an elegant ivory holder and had cucumber sandwiches served as we labored over the page proofs.

Her face changed completely when John came in from high school. All attention to the book was wiped away as the day’s lessons from a blackboard, and her face turned radiant as her son, in T-shirt and blue jeans entered the room.”Angel,”she called him as she introduced him to me and, as she took a phone call, he explained he was in his last week of tests before summer vacation.”There was a question about my father on the test today,”he said off-handedly, letting you feel, without complaining about it, the date and time stamp of history on his life.

And”Angel”she called him again, revealing what her son seemed to be to her, a fair and handsome gift to sustain her, along with his sister Caroline, in the innermost chambers of a heart nobody else could enter in the same way.

It was”Angel”she spoke of later, sitting on a couch in front of shelves packed with folios embossed in gold for a succession of years, ending abruptly with 1963, and sealed with the initials J.F.K & J.B.K.. She understood the backwash of politics and she would never push her son in that direction, she would let him talk to Dave Powers, then at the Kennedy Museum in Boston, about its realities.

She spoke warmly of the late Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston whose counsel had brought peace to her heart in that long time of tumult after her husband had been assassinated. But she would pause and shift back to her children, aware, as someone who had drunk deeply of the cup of mystery and loss, that she had to commit him to the slipstream of history.

It was in that slipstream, in the darkness not far from the Cape and islands where one found the white clapboard Camelot of his family, that he met the kind of destiny his mother feared and he could not avoid.

It was in a descent into the waters, into the biblical depths, beyond bell and buoy, in the vasty deep, the perennial symbol of the unconscious, that he broke free of time and of burdens unimaginable to us, packed tight as the rings in a redwood with memory and expectation, more poignant even than the baggage _ how searing in its signature on our souls _ that drifted like last mute messages ashore.

The Camelot so many remember and others idealize closes with the century. Like them or not, vote them in or vote them out, the Kennedys live in our unconscious and, as a clan, have seen all the glory and sadness, courting and finding each, living fully and suffering in the same measure. Some would accuse them of being more sinful than saintly, yet this might be said of us all, and which of us, do you think, could stand the repeated blows that have been visited on Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and carry on, the weight-bearing column for this remarkable, destiny-ridden family?

One wonders, in the long run, with all its accomplishments and all its flaws, if this extended family, with children scurrying at the edges both of tragedies and triumphs, does not symbolize, far more realistically than many an abstract lesson, what it means to be pro-life?

Being pro-life, after all, means that you affirm it, believe in the family and make room for future generations so they can take it on instead of skulking away from it with the alibi that the world is far too dangerous to bring children into it.

John F. Kennedy Jr., has closed its Camelot chapter but he has not ended his family’s engagement with life. He has affirmed its appetite for existence, its readiness to risk its talents rather than burying them in the ground, and left us, this Johnny we hardly knew, with a sense that long ago his mother knew, somewhere deep in her soul, that she had to let him go through a brief sunlit day into an early dark.

DEA END KENNEDY