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Celebrity is hardly a prerequisite. Kennedy's life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet's phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton." A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, save the friends she cherished, yet gestures of friendship were her public service. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year. A middle-age African-American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness. The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy's loft building began simply with neighbors paying homage to a neighbor. From such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed. The pity for the rest of us is that sometimes one learns of the measure of a life only because it is over.
When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Whatever constituted his being--his gait, manners, tone of voice, political opinions, appearance, his particular use of language, philosophy, sense of beauty, sense of style, his personal history, ambitions, his smile--all go. Everything dies but the reverberation of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude; yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.
Keats chose as his epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would be but one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.