Bobby Jr. claims Michael’s “the greatest athlete of our generation,” and notes, “In all my life I’ve never seen anyone ski as beautifully as Michael.” Even Bob Beattie, a former US Olympic ski coach, has praised Michael’s talent for skiing. “Michael is the best skier, a tremendously gifted athlete who could ski downhill backwards and blindfolded,” another friend notes. He’s confident enough to not only forgo his ski poles but often to videotape the action as the group tosses and receives the brightly colored foam ball, though on this occasion the New York Times notes that it’s his ten-year-old daughter who is “videotaping their antics.”
They’ve played this game many times before, including earlier that week. The columnist R. Couri Hay, who was present on New Year’s Eve, says, “Michael is the ringleader, without question,” and recalls that the previous game had ended in a tie. “Then they said, ‘We’ll play tomorrow—death to the loser.’”
It’s mild weather, a little after four o’clock in the evening, and the group is about halfway down the run when Michael calls out to his buddy Blake “Harvey” Fleetwood, “Pass me the ball, Harve!” Michael catches it. He’s looking uphill and considering where to throw the ball again, not realizing he’s about to collide with a three-foot-wide spruce tree.
“Stop! Stop!” Rory tries to warn her brother.
But it’s too late.
Michael crashes headfirst into the tree and is knocked unconscious.
“There was blood all over the snow,” says R. Couri Hay.
Michael’s sister Rory is the first to reach him. She races over and begins administering CPR. “Michael,” she tells him, while others move to shield the two from the children’s view, “now is the time to fight. Don’t leave us!”
Paramedics from the ski patrol arrive within minutes and take over CPR as the children yell, “It’s my father! Please help my daddy!” R. Couri Hay recalls, “Several of the Kennedys were on their knees saying the Lord’s Prayer.”
The paramedics work feverishly to stabilize Michael’s neck with a cervical collar, loading him onto a toboggan for emergency transport to Aspen Valley Hospital. “On-mountain treatment included intensive cardiac care, spinal immobilization, and respiratory support,” a prepared statement from the resort reads.
Despite best efforts, Michael Kennedy is pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital at 5:50 p.m. The Pitkin County coroner’s office notes cause of death is multiple injuries from blunt-force trauma to the head and neck, and is deemed accidental. No trace of drugs or alcohol are found in his body.
Aspen Club Lodge bellman and driver Matthew Malone recalls picking up a female passenger at 6:00 p.m. that evening, with instructions to bring her to the hospital. “Should I drop you off at Admissions or Emergency?” he inquires, to which she responds in a “tone sharp with anger and sorrow.
‘He’s dead. Wherever you go for that.’”
CNN reports that Michael’s body is flown home to Hyannis Port on actor Kevin Costner’s jet, and shortly after he is buried next to his brother David, near their grandparents, Joe and Rose.
It’s a sadly familiar scene, stoic Kennedys in mourning.
“We don’t know what to make of another Kennedy death,” Kevin Sowyrda, a Massachusetts Republican political analyst, tells the Washington Post. “We almost expect it now.”
“The Kennedys play too hard and live too hard,” one former White House correspondent observes. “They push the envelope, and sometimes it blows up.”
Others are more compassionate.
Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino says, “I don’t know anyone who can match the sort of continuum of sadness this family has had,” adding, “Maybe that’s the price you pay for great glories.”
To a packed church of mourners and hundreds of spectators, Michael’s brothers Bobby Jr. and Joe eulogize him, focusing on his achievements in business and human rights. “He was not made for comfort or ease,” Joe remarks. “He was the athlete dying young of A. E. Housman’s verse: ‘Like the wind through the woods, through him the gale of life blew high.’”
“He died, three years sober, on a forty-degree day under a blue sky in the company of his children, his family, and friends he loved,” Bobby Jr. says. “He caught the ball, turned to a friend, and said his final words: ‘This is really great!’ The last thing he saw was his children. The next thing he saw was God.”
* * *
Even in a year as difficult as 1997, the Kennedys still celebrate “a nugget of happy news,” as the New York Times proclaims when announcing the birth of Ethel and Bobby’s twenty-first grandchild on May 22.
Both Courtney Kennedy (the fifth of Ethel and Bobby’s brood, between brothers David and Michael) and her husband of four years, Paul Hill, are in their forties when their first and only child, Saoirse (pronounced “Searsha”) Roisin Hill, is born.
“I couldn’t understand a word he said,” Courtney recalls of first hearing Paul’s thick Belfast accent, “but I thought: ‘He’s gorgeous.’” They meet in 1990, when Courtney is recovering from a broken neck sustained in a skiing accident, and Paul—an Irishman known as one of “the Guildford Four”—is recently released from fifteen years in prison for an IRA bombing he didn’t commit, as dramatized in the Oscar-nominated 1993 movie In the Name of the Father. (Ironically, Courtney’s cousin Caroline Kennedy had once nearly been the victim of an IRA bombing herself. In October 1975, when she was seventeen and living in London, a bomb under the car Caroline was scheduled to take exploded prematurely, tragically killing a neighbor, a renowned cancer researcher.)
Courtney has a particular affinity for the Kennedys’ ancestral land, recalling the feeling of her first visit to Ireland as a teenager, “I felt like I was at home.” Her aunt Jean Kennedy Smith begins a five-year ambassadorship to Ireland in 1993, the year of Paul and Courtney’s marriage.
Reclusive Courtney, according to Vanity Fair, is “the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the [RFK] bunch.” She also grapples with lifelong depression, though she doesn’t blame it on the circumstances of her upbringing. “My difficulty was being able to say ‘I’m a Kennedy and I’m suffering from depression.’”
That she and Paul name their daughter Saoirse—which means “Freedom” in Gaelic—is profound, but Courtney wavers on passing along the Kennedy. “I just thought it would be one name too many,” she explains. Though at first the sole Kennedy grandchild not to use the name, in later years Courtney’s daughter seems happy to claim it, signing her name “Saoirse Kennedy-Hill.”
In 2002, Courtney and Paul decide to move their family to Ireland, where they can bring their daughter up in a “less manic” environment. “Being here,” Courtney notes, “is the best medication I can think of,” for her lingering depression. And Saoirse, both her parents say, is “very Irish.” The marriage doesn’t last, however, and when the couple separates in 2006, Courtney and Saoirse, then eight years old, move back to the United States.
Courtney’s cousin Timothy Shriver calls his niece “an only child with a hundred brothers and sisters,” and her uncle Bobby Jr. agrees, saying, “She became a sister or daughter to a hundred Kennedys, Shrivers, and Lawfords. We all considered her our own.”