When Eyes Are Watching

This year most of my friends and I turn 50. This means we were born in 1963, the year the unimaginable happened.  We were too young to feel the impact of the assassination of John F. Kennedy but we, like so many, have a connection to the event.

The events of November 22, 1963 became part of our story.

"What year were you born?"
"1963"
"The year they killed Jack Kennedy."

We grew up learning about President Kennedy, his beautiful wife, and his children Caroline and John - This beautiful young family and the tragic events that changed their lives and the country forever. The images have been around our whole lives.

Admittedly, when I was growing up I did not realize how young Jacqueline Kennedy was when she was First Lady. I knew they were all young. He was the youngest President. She his young wife.  Their children so young.

Jackie Kennedy was 31 when she became First Lady and 34 when JFK died.  This revelation stunned me.  It wasn't until I was 31, in 1994 the year Jacqueline Kennedy died, that the full impact of what she dealt with came into clear focus. Home with a two year old baby and a government working husband I started thinking about how all those young mothers must have felt in 1963. Looking at her. Watching her. Her heart broken. How composed she was.

When all eyes were watching she was able to stand tall, stay focused, keep her composure.  How?  Who knows - but she did.  When faced with the unthinkable she was able to do the unimaginable.  This has had an incredible impact on my life.  So many years after those events I think to myself if she could get through those days with that much grace maybe I can find a way to try to handle things better.

We never know who will impact our lives or whose life we will effect. The world will never be watching me but my own three kids have and do everyday.  Every day 22 pairs of eyes watch everything I do. I try to remember the example of Jackie Kennedy.  Well, sometimes I forget but mostly I remember.

The 50th Anniversary of that Day in Dallas is a good time to stop and recommit to being mindful of our actions and reactions to events, to news, and to the daily dramas of life.  It's a good day to remember.

May We Never Forget

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this 

continent, a new nation, conceived in

Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863