ShareWIK.com

The death of Eleanor Mondale Poling, daughter of Vice President Walter F. and Joan Mondale, just two days after the demise of Kara Kennedy Allen, daughter of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, serves to remind us of the tyranny of mortality and its indifference to age and station.

People find rueful satisfaction in whispering about “the Kennedy curse” when yet another young member of the clan dies but the survivors, parents, brothers, sisters, children, have always been real people who hurt and grieve and must cope in the flare of public chatter.   Kara Kennedy was a producer whose work centered on a variety of non-for-profit endeavors in health and recovery.  Eleanor was an actress and artiste of considerable renown.  Both women had battled cancers; both were only 51.

 When I interviewed Walter Mondale for a book just a few months after his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election, I came with a grim coincidence.  I had just officiated a day earlier at the burial of a youngster whose parents were understandably inconsolable.  

Mondale was deeply empathetic for the family and told me to call him by his nickname “Fritz.”  

At one point he said, about losing a child, “It’s something I couldn’t simply imagine.”

Joan Mondale, who was not present at this meeting in the legislator’s Washington law office, once worked as a curator at the art museum in my hometown of Cincinnati.  Everything about the plain-speaking Minnesota Mondales is guileless and straightforward.  The former vice president and senator taught me the concept of “critical love” when it comes to true patriotism that is devoid of entertainment values.  He knew he had meager chances of unseating the incumbent Reagan in 1984—particularly since Reagan brought his incomparable, image-making Hollywood skills to the enterprise of the presidency.

“I hated television and knew it didn’t do me any good,” Mondale told me that day.  He also admitted that likely lost the 1984 election the moment he stated that “I will raise taxes.”  He was just telling the truth, he muttered to me.  Every president since then has raised taxes in one way or another but was universally disingenuous about it. 

So you are left with a strong impression about young Eleanor’s household.  The Mondale family has never shed their cold- prairie honesty and their lack of infatuation with flair and theatrics.   The former vice president and ambassador to Japan has been a stalwart liberal supporter of civil rights since 1948, when he was already a protégé of the garrulous but unabashedly populist Hubert H. Humphrey.

But what Fritz Mondale has always been most intensely is a father.  Along with Joan, he surely is walking through a parent’s worst nightmare with his usual dignity and unashamed anguish.

And my God rest the souls of two broken songs, Kara Kennedy Allen and Eleanor Mondale Poling.

Ben Kamin is one of America's best known rabbis, a multicultural spiritualist, NYT Op-ed contributor and author of seven books, including his latest, "NOTHING LIKE SUNSHINE: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination."  He is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist.

 More Ben Kamin articles, click here 

©2011 ShareWIK Media Group, LLC