Assassination

Fifty years ago today I was a 13 year-old student at Boston College High School, located about a quarter mile from my current home. It was a Friday, like today. The crackling announcement came over the intercom system in our classroom. President Kennedy, that icon of Catholic and Iris-American ascendance, was shot. 

Later that day at school, while I was at the chess club, the announcement was made that JFK was dead. The entire school of 1200 students ran with tears. I had never seen my worldly Jesuit teachers cry openly and hug one another in consolation. The trip home to Chelsea, a 90-minute trek on subway and bus across town, was nearly silent. Strangers of all types on the train nodded tearfully to one another.

The younger generations may be able to relate on the basis of their own reactions to 911 or the Marathon Bombing. However, the Kennedy assassination was intensely personal for those of us with any conscious connection to immigrants in our daily lives, especially Catholic immigrants. 

At 13, I had already experienced great personal loss. My paternal grandfather had died two years earlier. He had helped me salvage myself from devastating abuse by parents, relatives and nuns. Three of my peers had died suddenly in the two years after. My best friend in a family car accident which wiped out most of his large family. My friend Diane, born the same day as I was, who lived on the next street and died rapidly from spinal meningitis after a day at school. Beautiful little Whitey, a classmate on whom I had a crush, was run over by a drunken neighbor as she backed out of her driveway without looking. 

These losses all felt like assassinations to me. They also felt like further assassinations of parts of my personality which were constantly under threat. All of these lost loved ones had accepted me for myself. My parents and some relations had never done so. They constantly told me they saw me as too sensitive, too artistic, too neurotic, too feminine, too clumsy, too this or too that. The assassination of JFK extended my hatred for those who persecuted me to humanity in general. I resolved to be fearless, invulnerable, prepared for my own death at the hands of a brutal world. 

A therapist once told me that she felt that my inner self was a bloody, pounded piece of bleeding red meat in my fears. This was her well-meaning attempt to encourage me to be "less defended". I explained to her that my inner self felt like a piece of bloody red meat often. I consciously drew on that pain to grow and heal as best I can. She was skeptical. I think she just wanted to see me blubber in her office. My becoming teary-eyed wasn't enough for her, I guess. She helped me at the time, but I don't think she was very satisfied by the experience.

Now, fifty years to the day after JFK's fabled death, I have returned to the same neighborhood where I heard the fateful news after decades of nomadic wandering. When I walk out to the peninsula where the JFK Library now stands above rising tide lines next to the University of Massachusetts Boston,  my return route takes me by my Jesuit prep school, which stands where it stood fifty years ago. I tread the same walk I walked that day of sadness and resolve. I am always reminded consciously of the effect of that time, that day, on my life. I am still here. I am not fearless, but I am strong. I am not invulnerable, but my openness is tempered with skepticism. I am prepared for my death, but I realize that it is not unlike any other in this mortal world.