A Quiet Loss

  John Kennedy Jr. and Anthony Radziwill were more than just first cousins, their mothers being sisters. They were best friends since they were kids. Both stood up for each other at one another’s wedding. Their wives too becoming best friends.

 In July of 1999, the Radziwills were staying at Red Gate Farm, John’s mother’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard he took over after she died, waiting for him and Carolyn.

 Few knew that Anthony was dying. He had been stoically fighting a rare case of sarcoma for five years, now knowing the end was near. It was the reason he and his wife Carole were staying there, hoping the Vineyard’s cooler climes would be a nicer place to be, as the four of them spent one last time together.

  John was so certain of this, he had already started writing Anthony’s eulogy that was found in his desk drawer at his loft on North Moore Street.

  They waited and waited, and of course John and Carolyn never came, their plane crashing taking their lives along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren’s.

  Anthony was the one who called Caroline to tell her, her brother’s plane was missing.

  What always strikes me as utter hubris is how we always think we know how things will be. Whoever dreamed Anthony, as sick as he was, would have outlived his cousin?

   On the boat from where they scattered John, Carolyn and Lauren’s ashes at sea, Anthony can be seen on deck, alongside other family members, in his wheelchair.

    He died on August 10, 1999, six days after his 40th birthday, and less than a month after his beloved cousin’s 38th.

    Technically a Polish Prince, a title inherited from his father, was why the eulogy, John, alas, would never give, ended with this poignant passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet…

‘Goodnight sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’

                                          1959-1999 

SB