Maybe what we needed her to be. It was somehow exactly right on Monday that the way most of us saw her burial in Arlington Cemetery next to President John F. Kennedy was through the lens of a television camera. At her funeral in New York, the cameras outside St. Ignatius Loyola Church showed us only the somber crowd of spectators on the street. In Arlington, the lens peered down the slope, over the row of clipped bushes and into the granite bowl that Jackie had helped design as President Kennedy's gravesite. The granite bowl is a haunted place, but it isn't quiet.
Birds chitter loudly and full of life in the nearby magnolia trees.
The microphones broadcasting her burial service picked them up clearly, along with a few snuffles from the family and friends gathered around what to them is an all-too familiar site. Jack's prematurely born son, Patrick Bouvier. Four months later, they buried his father, the nation's president. A stillborn daughter was brought to lie in what would become a family cemetery for the Kennedys. Five years later, they buried Robert F. Kennedy, also assassinated.