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The links were warm but sensitive. Doris Kearns, a Kennedy biographer, remembers long phone conversations with Onassis. "She would talk about what it was like when she first met Joe and Rose Kennedy, how she would listen to classical music on the porch at Hyannis Port with Joe because they both liked classical music, how she didn't play touch football with everyone else, how difficult it was with Rose in the beginning. The whole Kennedy family drew the married kids away from their wives, but she was determined to create a nuclear family for Jack." Kearns relates how Onassis felt about large families. "She went through the Kennedy children, one by one, how each one was hurt and overshadowed by the one before. It was all very perceptive. She was not sentimental at all."
THE END CAME FAST. FRIENDS SAY ONASSIS, who had prided herself on her fitness, was shocked to discover that she had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a treatable but tricky form of cancer that often strikes people in their 60s and 70s. She announced in late February that she was undergoing treatment. For once in her life, a private event was public knowledge, because she still returned to her beloved Central Park, where the photographers could train their lenses on her. With Caroline, her baby John, and Tempelsman, she could be seen walking the paths as best she could, passing the places where she played as a child.
As recently as last month she told a friend that things were going well: "I'm almost glad it happened because it's given me a second life. I laugh and enjoy things so much more." However, the cancer had spread to her brain and her liver from her lymph nodes. On Wednesday, after deciding that further medical treatment would be fruitless, she went home. She died the evening after. This week she is to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery beside her husband and her son Patrick.
Talking to reporters, John Kennedy Jr. said his mother had died "surrounded by her friends and her family and her books. She did it in her own way and in her own terms." Despite a lifelong confrontation with death, that is how she lived and the example she gave to the world.