Even for a cynical sod like me, Arlington National Cemetery is a place that hushes the mind. Rarely do I go to Washington when I don't stop by the gentle hillside beneath the mansion that once belonged to the traitor, R.E. Lee and visit the Kennedy plot. What is most moving to me is not the eternal flame, although that's a lovely touch, or the elaborate semi-plaza dedicated to the slain president, but the resting place of his slain brother, the senator from New York, buried there like a Franciscan beneath a simple white wooden cross, and also the markers memorializing the late president's children who died at birth, or not long after it—the stillborn daughter, informally named Arabella by her mother, and young Patrick, who lived only 39 days and died three months before his father did in 1963. |
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