Dallas 1963

Where were you, this day in 1963, when you heard the news that changed our world and forever took away our innocence?

Each generation has that defining moment, Pearl Harbor for my parents, 911 for my daughter, but for us, the assassination of JFK was OUR defining moment. I was in the back seat of my parent's Green Bellaire. My mom heard the news on the radio and pulled the car over at the corner of Bartee and Van Nuys. She kept sobbing "oh that young man" over and over. I was five and coming home from morning kindergarten classes. 53 years later, I can still feel myself, frightened for a reason I did not really understand- what five year old back then knew anything about death? My family mourned him, grieved for his widow and his children. I suppose it was the fact that he had children who were our age that made his death more tragic to us. We saw him laughing with them and we saw what death and grief were, in their faces.

They say the nation looked to Jackie, to teach them how to mourn. What an incredible sad duty being First Lady must have been for her. Her obvious sorrow, held together with such stately grace is something I remember, probably not from the events, but the photos taken of her. How terrible to be forced to bear your unimaginable grief in public, not to be allowed to sob or break down. She was an amazing woman. She understood her part in history. When she began her life as first lady, I recall that people didn't think much of her and said so. They mocked her efforts to remodel the White House, but she was a student of history and architecture and was able to call on the greatest minds to assist her in the task of making the White House a showplace after the war years. Yet when our country was at our most hopeless point, we put all our grief and pain on her slim shoulders; and she rose to the task. She was always trying to get away from that personae, I think, which is probably one of the reasons she married Onassis; she could escape and he could protect her. We thought we knew her and thought we owned her. This was never the case. I hope she had a marvelous life, despite it all. But as I think of this day in Dallas in 1963, I see her in that pink suit, splattered with his blood, bravely leading the nation for a brief moment of absolute shock and grief.