A flag for Ted Kennedy

I hadn't thought about how I might feel about Ted Kennedy dying. Having spent my life trailing along behind the boomers, I had not felt as identified with the Kennedy clan as so many in the generation prior to mine.

I knew he was a good Senator. I knew that he seemed to be a flavor of good Senator that we don't seem to get much anymore; the liberal kind.

But hearing the news, I found myself wanting to fly a flag I don't own, at half-mast. We do that for Presidents and ex-Presidents, including ones who caused a lot of trouble. Why not for this man, who did a lot of good, a little further down in our national governmental hierarchy?

It seems like an ending of something besides Senator Kennedy, his death. It feels like something larger and longer has come to some kind of sonorous conclusion, some kind of end of childhood. We became the grownups too, long ago. But we never really believed we were quite the same kind of grownups, with our idealism and our counterculture idiosyncracies. Somehow we thought we'd go on forever, or if not, that we'd at least go down nobly in defeat, in the pursuit of our valiant goals, in mortal combat with the terrible enemy.

This death of attrition was the last thing on our minds. It never occurred to us that not only would we age and weaken, but that our ideals, too, might wither on the vine, the fruit of our visions hanging too high. We were sure our history would never be forgotten. Our war, too, would be the last one.

It hangs heavy on many of us, this failure of humility. The best of us, though, do what they can, and do not overly indulge in such self-recrimination. I expect Ted Kennedy qualified for that description.