Ethel Kennedy, the formidable widow of Robert F. Kennedy and matriarch to a branch of one of the country’s most prominent families, has died. She was 96.
Ethel Kennedy, died on Thursday, Oct. 10, “from complications related to a stroke suffered last week,” according to a statement from her daughter, Kerry, posted on X.
“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saoirse; and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie,” the statement reads. “Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers.”
Ethel Kennedy was the mother to 11 children, two of whom she outlived. Her son David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in 1984 in Palm Beach, Fla. Another son Michael Kennedy died in 1997, when he skied into a tree while playing touch football in Aspen, Colo.
Ethel Kennedy survived a multitude of other tragedies in her nine-plus decades, including the assassination of her husband in 1968, just five years after his older brother, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.
Her parents — George and Ann Skakel — died in a 1955 plane crash. She lost her beloved nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a 1999 plane crash, which also killed his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren. Her daughter-in-law, Mary Richardson Kennedy (the wife of her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) killed herself by hanging on May 16, 2012.
On Aug. 1, 2019, she lost her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy due to an accidental drug overdose. And in the spring of 2020, her granddaughter Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean and great-grandson Gideon McKean were found dead after they went missing while canoeing days earlier.
Asked how she survived so many personal tragedies, Ethel, who admitted she was not one for introspection, told PEOPLE in a 2012 interview, “I pretty well lived in the moment. And I was blessed with faith.”
Ethel Skakel was born on April 11, 1928, the sixth of George and Ann Skakel’s seven children. Her father made a fortune as the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation and their family grew up in splendor in Greenwich, Conn.
Ethel Kennedy met Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, the brother of her Manhattanville College roommate, Jean Kennedy, in 1945. “No maybe about it,” she told PEOPLE of her immediate attraction when they met on a ski trip in Quebec. Bobby, however, first dated her older sister Patricia Skakel. That romance lasted two years and once their relationship was over, he began dating Ethel.
The two married in 1950. “We both wanted a lot of children, but there wasn’t a huge discussion about it,” she told PEOPLE in 2012. “It wasn’t a big deal. We were both from big families.”
They raised their children in their rambling 13 bedroom home known as Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia.
Bobby, a lawyer, worked for the Department of Justice and later became the attorney general under his brother. After President Kennedy’s death, Ethel supported her husband’s historic run for the presidency. She was in attendance the night of June 5, 1968, when he was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. At the time, she was pregnant with their daughter Rory.
It was her faith that allowed her to keep going, she told People. “I’d wake up in the morning and think he was happy in heaven and he had Jack — and they were together as they had been together on earth.”
“I didn’t think how I would survive,” she said. “I knew it would happen but I didn’t know how.”
Following her husband’s assassination, Ethel Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, which is now run by her daughter Kerry Kennedy.
For the next five decades, she fiercely fought so that her husband’s legacy, and his commitment to help the less fortunate, would be remembered.
Her love for her children was more often tough than tender. As the younger Bobby wrote in his 2018 book American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family, “My mother … divided the world into friend and foe. Generally she judged the latter by harsher standards, and yet she sometimes discarded time-honored friendships for minor infractions. I faulted her for being mercurial and arbitrary.”
Bobby, who struggled with drug addiction as a teenager, revealed they grew closer once he got sober in the mid-’80s.
As he wrote, he eventually discovered that much of her toughness was in response to the many losses she had endured. “Everyone takes their licks,” she once told him. “We feel like we ought to be able to write our own scripts to our lives, and sometimes we feel disappointed in God when life rewrites the plot. The key is acceptance and gratitude. We need to practice wanting what we’ve got, not what we wish we had.”