Personal History

7) further thoughts

It touches me still that this young girl, who was, if anything, more devastated than I, could scribble out this simple but correct sequence of thoughts and jump in the car in her nightclothes to put them in my hand.

I recall walking into the room where the all-male board was gathered. To a man they looked almost as stricken as I was. They also seemed to be looking at me hard to decipher what was there.

Phil's funeral was on Tuesday, August 6, in the Washington National Cathedral, and was so big and so public that in a way it again shielded me from what was really happening. The children and I had all participated in deciding on the nature of the service and the selection of the hymns. President Kennedy attended. He came up the side aisle by himself after everyone was seated. The sun shone through the stained-glass windows, somehow illuminating him as he walked to his seat.

One jolt occurred when we left for the private burial. Others had been to the funeral home to make all the arrangements, but I didn't know the details. I did know from Phil's endless jokes that he had procured a plot in Oak Hill, the cemetery across the street from our house. It was extremely difficult to get in--the Dean Achesons, the David Bruces, and the John Walkers were all planning to be buried there--and Phil had developed an enthusiasm of an odd kind to be buried there, too. One night long before he became ill, he came home from a St. Albans school-board meeting and said there was a man on the board who was influential at Oak Hill and he was sure we could have a plot. He went on joking about it, saying that all I would have to do was to wheel him across the street. I was deeply upset when we pulled up in front of the burial site to find that this was not an exaggeration. His grave is directly in front of a little chapel right across the street from my house, where I can see it every day. I like this now, but in the beginning it disturbed me a great deal.

People came home afterwards--touchingly, people from all over. It's funny how much you care who is there--and even somehow count the house at a moment like that. For friends to care and to come means something.