K is for Kennedy Family Curse

Joseph Kennedy,
US Securities and Exchange
Commission, Public Domain,
Wikimedia Commons

Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald had nine children between 1915 and 1932. Today, only one of those children still lives, Jean Kennedy. All but one of her siblings died young, or fairly young, in terrible ways. One, Rosemary Kennedy, lived to 86. However, she had been incapacitated due to a failed lobotomy for mental illness in 1941, and kept in an institution for 63 years. The rest of her siblings died between the years of 1944 and 2009 from plane crashes, cancer, Addison's disease, and assassination.

Their children have met much the same type of fate, and the family has been riddled with scandal, from murder to affairs to car accidents that have taken others' lives or paralyzed them. Even worse, many who have married into the family have met untimely or tragic deaths. Suicide, plane crashes, and more. Now the great-grandchildren are suffering.

This is thought by some to be an actual curse. The Kennedy Family Curse.

JFK, By White House Press Office (WHPO) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mental illness, cocaine overdose, bone cancer, skiing accident, miscarriages, suicides, premature babies, car accidents, airplane accidents...murder. All of this wrapped into two generations of the same family. Anyone who associates with them is a possible victim of the curse, and the tragedy that circles them.

There is no record of an actual curse being leveled at them. However, they've found much success, both in politics and finances. Instead of a curse, could it simply be payback for a bargain forged to insure said success? Did someone pay with blood?

You can find a timeline here.

Was the curse invented by the media? Is it a real curse? Have they seen more than their share of tragedy, or can it simply be traced to the size of the family? Is it possible that someone in the Kennedy clan traded lives for financial and political success?

May you find your Muse.