What I'm learning from Ted Kennedy

Like many of us, I suppose, I've come to see Ted Kennedy over the years as a number of different people -- some good, most bad. Champion of the common man. Liberal elitist.  A playboy who vigorously abused drugs, alcohol, and women.  A committed, compassionate, tireless public servant.  A savvy, liberal tactician. A crony, a power broker. A settler, a compromiser.  Above all, a Kennedy. Part person, part media-created myth. All youthful vigor and shining teeth. From young and unreasonably handsome frat boy  to old, blotchy pudgy frat boy, the symbol of white American capitalist ambition and the narrowest definition of American liberty-- the ascent of the Irish in Yankee culture.  A modernist bundle of contradiction whom I could never fully embrace.

I don't think the events of the past few days and months have served to change much of this image of Ted Kennedy for me. He seems to have been a deeply flawed person. Yet, as I've watch his family and friends speak and witnessed the response to his passing by many around him, I feel a deepening awareness of some things that I, many of my close friends -- and I'm sure many of us who are passing into middle and old age -- are learning.  As I reflect on Ted Kennedy, I reflect also what it means to be a good person in the world, what it means to grow, to forgive - especially oneself, and to change one's life for the better.

In the past few years, I've witnessed my parents and in-laws all grapple with age and illness, and my friends, my wife and I with the challenges of sustaining marriage and family.  It's been a time of reflection and re-examination of who we are, where we come from, and how we create our own experiences. I think I'm beginning to better understand life as an ongoing act of becoming -- and this understanding has given me great hope.

I believe the place we operate from - what we think about ourselves and our world -- is not as easily named and identified as we would like. I  am, in a sense, myself, my mother, my father, my siblings, friends, colleagues - the totality of my experience.  We are what we are genetically, and we are what we are as product of our interaction with the world.  In a larger sense, we are the world, we are the interactivity.  So, it seems, it was with Teddy - Teddy was his father, his brothers (and the men who killed them), his classmates, his cronies - and he also was his women, his constituents, his children, his grandchildren.  Look at this way, the sense of conflict - the sense that Ted Kennedy was on the one hand crude and boorish and intolerable, and on the other worth of great admiration and affection -- can be seen as a reflection of the world in which he existed.

His is in a way an archetypal narrative - a heroic myth.  There came a time of reckoning - historians are suggesting it seemed to happen around the time Ted Kennedy took the witness stand in his nephew's rape trial and a short time later failed to come to the aid of Anita Hill when she needed support for courageous action.  The narrative tells us that these two events highlighted the deeply contradictory nature of Ted Kennedy's character, and helped awaken him in some new and important way to the destructive effects of his behavior on himself, his family, and ultimately on the People.  The turning point in the story comes with the beginning of a new, sorely needed relationship in Ted's life - Vicki - and with his public admission of flaw and public declaration of his intent to own his failings and take responsibility for them. With this acceptance of responsibility there came a re-commitment -- to live the values he publicly embraced, to strive to be a better man. To become the father his entire family needed, the husband he had failed to be, the champion in life he professed to be in his work.  Teddy, in other words, owned his faults and started new.  His strengths multiplied.  He created for himself a new narrative. And if any of the sentiments expressed over and again by those who knew him briefly and those who knew him best are to be embraced, he became a loving and beloved person.

The true power of forgiveness, and of blessing,  is the power to wipe the slate clean. It is the power to say "It begins now."  We make our confession, we own our faults, we forgive ourselves, we act in love, and we change our lives. We change the totality of our experience.  I miss Ted Kennedy, and I am grateful for having had him in my life.  He was, I think, a good and great man, battling terrible forces, and growing wise in his old age.  I intend to study his life more closely, because I think there is much to discover in his example.