Hines was also in the process of divorcing a spouse, Paul Young. Her distance from Robert F. Kennedy in the photo seems to have been an effort to spare his wife’s feelings.
Just how close Hines really was to Robert Kennedy Jr. became increasingly clear over the months that followed. The gossip pages buzzed about their relationship and said that Hines was helping Robert Kennedy Jr.’s daughter by his first marriage get started as an actress.
In a photo taken at the 2012 Fishermen’s Ball benefit for Riverkeeper, Robert Kennedy Jr. stood alone with Hines, his arm around her, both of them smiling as if now they had it right.
Nobody could say they were running around or cheating. And Hines was not some hot young trophy beauty. She was a mature woman who had been cast as Larry David’s wife on TV.
To a coroner, the heart is just a chambered pump and the question of what might have prompted this woman to hang herself was beyond his purview.
A friend says that Mary Richardson Kennedy saw the photos of the new, all-too-real-life couple and that, in her despair, she began to relinquish hope of her husband ever coming back. She was coming to realize that she was ending up as the second ex after all, that she was not so different, that he was not so changed.
She knew that drinking eroded any chance that she could just keep going on her own or maybe even find somebody new. She began going to Alcoholics Anonymous and struggled to stay sober.
This year’s St. Patrick’s Carnival opened on the Tuesday after Mother’s Day. Had the family still been together, they could have all gone to join the rest of the parish in marking the start of another spring.
Early Wednesday afternoon, she was alone save for the housekeeper who is said by news reports to have found her body in the barn. Hanging can trigger a reflex known as vagal inhibition, which can instantly stop the heart. But the autopsy Thursday determined that Mary Richardson Kennedy died from pressure around the neck that obstructed both her airway and the flow of blood to her brain.
“The cause of death was put at asphyxiation due to hanging,” said a spokeswoman for the Westchester County Medical Examiner.
Of course, the coroner was only talking in the most immediate and concrete terms. To a coroner, the heart is just a chambered pump and the question of what might have prompted this woman to hang herself was beyond his purview. He was not speaking of the heart as we speak of the core of us, as something that soars or breaks at moments of rapture or despair.
No comments:
Post a Comment