Ethel Kennedy, Family Matriarch and RFK’s Widow, Dies at 96

Mar. 15, 2025

Ethel Kennedy, the formidable widow ofRobert F. Kennedyand matriarch to a branch of one of the country’s most prominent families, has died. She was 96.

Kennedy, died on Thursday, Oct. 10, “from complications related toa stroke suffered last week,” according to a statement from her daughter, Kerry, posted on X.

“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saoirse; and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie,” the statement reads. “Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers.”

Kennedy was the mother to 11 children, two of whom she outlived. Her sonDavid Kennedydied of a drug overdose in 1984 in Palm Beach, Fla. Another sonMichael Kennedydied in 1997, when he skied into a tree while playing touch football in Aspen, Colo.

Ethel and Robert Kennedy with 10 children circa 1965.Bettman

Bettman

Kennedy survived amultitude of other tragediesin her nine-plus decades, including the assassination of her husband in 1968, just five years after his older brother,John F. Kennedy, wasassassinated.

Ethel Kennedy and her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1962.ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty

ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty

On Aug. 1, 2019, she lost her granddaughterSaoirse Kennedydue to an accidental drug overdose. And in the spring of 2020, her granddaughterMaeve Kennedy Townsend McKeanand great-grandsonGideon McKeanwere found dead after they went missing while canoeing days earlier.

Asked how she survived so many personal tragedies, Ethel, who admitted she was not one for introspection, told PEOPLE in a 2012 interview, “I pretty well lived in the moment. And I was blessed with faith.”

The Kennedy family at their Massachusetts home on the night after John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election. Ethel Kennedy stands on the far left.Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty

Ethel Skakel was born on April 11, 1928, the sixth of George and Ann Skakel’s seven children. Her father made a fortune as the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation and their family grew up in splendor in Greenwich, Conn.

The two married in 1950. “We both wanted a lot of children, but there wasn’t a huge discussion about it,” she told PEOPLE in 2012. “It wasn’t a big deal. We were both from big families.”

They raised their children in their rambling 13 bedroom home known as Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia.

Ethel and Robert Kennedy.

It was her faith that allowed her to keep going, she told PEOPLE. “I’d wake up in the morning and think he was happy in heaven and he had Jack — and they were together as they had been together on earth.”

“I didn’t think how I would survive,” she said. “I knew it would happen but I didn’t know how.”

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty

For the next five decades, she fiercely fought so that her husband’s legacy, and his commitment to help the less fortunate, would be remembered.

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As he wrote, he eventually discovered that much of her toughness was in response to the many losses she had endured. “Everyone takes their licks,” she once told him. “We feel like we ought to be able to write our own scripts to our lives, and sometimes we feel disappointed in God when life rewrites the plot. The key is acceptance and gratitude. We need to practice wanting what we’ve got, not what we wish we had.”

source: people.com