On that Day We Lost JFK

I was that young mother calming our children as our world fell apart

AP Photo

On that day I was up in my sewing room, away from the TV. My four-year-old son was napping, and my 7-year-old daughter was in school. My husband was at work. It was early afternoon.

I heard the back door open and before I could start to the stairs, I could hear my neighbor, Gwen, shouting something, sobbing. I thought something must have happened to her mother, who had been ailing. By the time I got to her she could barely speak. “They shot the president! They shot Kennedy!”

I turned on the TV and we sat watching, hoping, both of us, that he would be okay. This kind of thing just didn’t happen — not in our country, not to this president. We didn’t know, of course, that the top of his head had been blown off.

But then Walter Cronkite, fighting back tears, announced that our president was dead.

A while later, long before school was supposed to be out, my second-grader ran into the house. She was terrified. When the school staff heard the news they made the decision to send the kids home, but they also decided to leave it to the parents to tell the little kids what had happened. My daughter remembers seeing her teacher cry; she remembers running the three blocks home with a bunch of scared…