I sat down to watch a documentary on the life of Ethel Kennedy tonight and as I watched I remembered a book of letters written to Jackie after Jack's assassination that I read greedily some time after Christmas.
As Ethel quietly spoke about that day over black and white footage of people hearing the news for the first time, I saw the grief fresh as clean linen settle on their faces, and I thought of those letters, each written to try and make sense of the senseless. And I wondered if the people I saw, with their set hair and wet eyes, had sat down in the time after to write Jackie and to reach out to her; and I thought of the grief they shared, the man they lost, the dream they said goodbye to.
And then I imagined them all, Ethel and Bobby, Jack, Jackie, the children, in Cape Cod, dancing across blue seas on a big boat, sweaters tied around their necks, the sun making glitter on the oceans surface. And I imagined myself there too, laughing alongside them, before it changed into something else completely.
Before the waves crashed us back to the waters edge to begin again.
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