Website: The Demigods are Dead

Edward Moore Kennedy was laid to rest this past weekend. Along with this passing of a historical figure came the usual reflection of a life lived in the limelight. Superlatives sprinkled the plethora of eulogies; euphemisms by the dozens polished over the rougher edges of a life run ragged by the living. I write about this event neither to canonize nor to critique its person of focus, but to delve meaning from the event itself. What does this mean for most of us who were not related to nor represented by Senator Kennedy?

For us the living, those unscathed this time by personal grief, this event is yet another point of reference in the historical backdrop of our lives. The media has been recounting, over and over for the past few days, the profound events marking the milestones in Kennedy's life. Personal for him, historical for us, the death of one brother in war, two by assassination, a series of bad choices which ended a woman's life and his own aspirations, all are events which have ignited countless conversations at dinner tables and in classrooms, events which have helped to define a generation.

I am not of that generation. What I feel at these events of growing frequency, is the severing of links to a past I never knew. Black hearses and antique caissons carrying the players of our historical drama, as "I remember when" fades from all too many voices lost forever. History becomes two-dimensional right before our oft-distracted eyes.

What events will mark my time here? The historical and the personal do not intertwine for me; I am an observer only. I have seen space shuttles explode and towers fall and world leaders meet their natural death. I was around before there was Internet. I've lived under six presidents, two popes, and one King of Pop. I loved baseball before the players' strike — before steroids.

I take comfort in seeing Rep. Patrick Kennedy misquote a Robert Frost poem in the eulogy he prepared, reciting from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," while claiming the quote was from "The Road Less Traveled." A grieving son is entitled to make mistakes, as are we all. But there is something profound about scions of history stepping off of their pedestals and acting human unexpectedly. The demigods are dead; I've watched the marble figures of tomorrow shed yesterday's flesh and have their last parade. President Nixon, Princess Di, Mother Teresa, President Reagan, Pope John Paul II, President Ford, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, and others, all have made their final curtain call as I looked on from afar.

Watching these celebrity services is watching our lives previewed on a grander scale. We will all have our turn to grieve in the pulpit, and we'll all have our turn to lie in the box. Most of us will mourn without an honor guard, without a midnight vigil, without streets lined with people, without pilgrims to the grave. We will hurt no less, have lost no less, love no less. We watch, over and over again, as the story unfolds. We are observers of life. I don't want the milestones of my life to be a parade of flag-draped caskets down Main Street, nor the honey-tongued eulogies of tabloid celebrities. I don't want my cherished memories to be of historical events watched on the television screen. When someone asks me, years from now, where I was when notable events yet to come unfolded in their due course, I hope I can tell them I was somewhere else, doing something worthwhile, leaving the observing to someone else.