Ethel Skakel Kennedy lived a lonely life in the five decades-plus since the assassination of her husband, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, in June 1968. When she passed on last week at the ripe old age of ninety-six, obituaries on her spoke of the vitality she brought into her life despite the trauma she was pushed into by the assassination of the partner who could have been President of the United States. She raised all her eleven children alone and then saw the children marrying and giving birth to her grandchildren. The tributes to her reflected on her resilience, even when two of her sons died in unnatural manner.
There is little question that Ethel Kennedy was a brave woman. She grew old over the years and certainly was lonely in her moments of reflection on the charmed life she led with her husband till he was cut down. It is hard for many of us to understand or feel the pain of women who have had the misfortune of losing their husbands to sudden misfortune and harder still to conceive of the lives they lead for years and decades after the tragedy in their lives has come to pass.
In 1971, many were the women who saw their husbands seized by the occupation Pakistan forces and their local collaborators, never to come back home. Panna Kaiser and Bashanti Guhathakurta and others struggled bravely on, never giving up their dignity. Zohra Tajuddin witnessed men with murder in their eyes take away her illustrious husband in 1975. Tajuddin Ahmad came back home a dead man, riddled with bullets and bayonet marks.
It is the tears of the young widows, left alone with their children, which speak to us of circumstances that chance upon our world, that destroy the lives of families who lose the men around whom their lives revolve, which leave gaping holes in our souls. When the mutineers at BDR murdered those fifty-seven army officers in February 2009, they left the families of the officers shattered. It is agony which has not, for obvious reasons, been overcome by the wives of the murdered men.
Alone and in silence, their tears flowing in their moments of loneliness, these women have cared for their children and their wider families all these years. We bow before their courage, their fortitude. But we will never know the pain that keeps eating away at them, in the depths of their being. And then there are the children who will never forget how brutally their fathers were murdered by men driven by villainous insanity in their eyes.
The world of the widow is a tale which goes beyond any work on literature we might have on our tables. In our generation, we have observed widows like Nusrat Bhutto shocked and aghast at knowing that a brutal dictator had actually sent her husband to the gallows in a macabre manifestation of injustice. We can imagine the trauma which the children of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went through when they lost their father. In our very own Bangladesh, the world inhabited by Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana was suddenly upended when their parents, siblings, sisters-in-law and others were assassinated in August 1975. They were children of a nation's founding father, of a President; and yet a well-laid conspiracy turned them in moments into the loneliest siblings and orphans in the world.
The sudden death of Sanjay Gandhi in an airplane crash brought the happy world of Maneka Gandhi to a screeching end. It led to more of unhappiness for her. Fraught relations with her mother-in-law led to conditions where she and her young son became estranged from the family. Mother and son were to traverse a political path different from that pursued by the family of Rajiv Gandhi. And, of course, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 swiftly put a brake on the life of a family which had only just begun to emerge from the trauma of the deaths of Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi.
Sonia Gandhi has bravely ploughed on, to ensure that her children and the Indian National Congress remain relevant in politics. She has grown old in grace but in indescribable pain. Which reminds us of the young widow of General Aung San, whose murder on the eve of Burma's independence essentially placed the country into a long trauma which continues even today. Aung San's widow went on to serve her country as ambassador to India and raise daughter Aung San Suu Kyi. She camouflaged her loneliness, kept it away from the world. But the pain was there, always.
Raana Liaquat Ali Khan was a beautiful and accomplished young woman when her husband, Pakistan's first Prime Minister, was assassinated in October 1951. She never remarried but went on to serve her country in dignity through the All-Pakistan Women's Association (APWA) and as Pakistan's ambassador abroad. Corazon Aquino saw her husband Benigno murdered at Manila airport on his return home. Jehan Sadat and Leah Rabin lost their husbands to assassins.
The young Jacqueline Kennedy was the recipient of global sympathy when President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in 1963. But that sympathy was frayed a good deal when she decided to marry the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis five years later. She lies buried beside her first husband at Arlington, but it was that remarriage which had her lead a life different from that of Ethel Kennedy.
When Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in April 1968, his widow Coretta Scott King was left looking after their children. She fulfilled her responsibilities with finesse, never ever letting the world into the pain and the loneliness she carried in her heart for the many years she survived her husband. Grace and poise she embodied in plenty. Here in Bangladesh, the widow of Brigadier Jamil, the only individual who rushed to save Bangabandhu and then met his death, carried the pain in her heart for decades.
And there were the other widows, of individuals who perished in a dark November, in a sad May, in a chilling June, in a September bathed in tears as Bangladesh struggled to regain the ground it had lost to men's malevolence and the inscrutable course of destiny.
Ethel Kennedy's death brings a sad yet remarkable life to an end. It is a reminder for all of us of the copious tears we have seen flow from the swollen eyes of every woman whose husband has died a sudden death across the years. Life has dealt cruelly with every widow, known and unknown, famous and ordinary.
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