“Hello, My Name Is Eunice”
By Colman McCarthy
Whether a believer or a doubter, you had to be awed at how efficiently Eunice Kennedy Shriver could be at passing on her Roman Catholic faith to her grandchildren. It was during Mass on a Saturday two Novembers ago at Our Lady of the Shriver Living Room in Potomac, Md. Well short of a full-cousined gathering of the Shriver-Kennedy Nation, a dozen members of the family and a few long-time loyalists who had shared its past grace moments and grieving times had come to celebrate the 92 birthday of husband Sargent Shriver. It would be Mass at 6, dinner at 7, opening of presents at 8 and everybody out the door or else--Eunice’s else--by 10. That’s Eunice’s bedtime, half dogma, half article of faith and don’t deny either.
Halfway through the liturgy, with wide sofas and deep lounge chairs serving as pews and the priest standing behind the altar--a deep mahogany coffee table holding fat-free Thomas English muffins as communion bread--it was time for the Prayers of the Faithful. Someone called out for world peace, another for the mentally disabled--a must. After the adults had their go, now the grandchildren. Emma Shriver, two years old and sitting in the lap of her father Mark, took the pacifier out of her mouth and asked everyone to please pray for the workers in her grandmother’s kitchen. “Lord, hear our prayer,” answered the faithful.
A smile crossed Eunice’s face. If she was feeling anything about Emma’s prayer, I’d guess it would be satisfaction--a child’s unstudied understanding early in life to be heedful of others. Close-by others. The invisible back-in-the-kitchen others. It may have been a moment also for Eunice to remember all the times she brought the mentally disabled into her home to cook, clean and keep the house going--a job training program, really, for people the world dismissed as sub-hopeless, too slow, too clumsy and certainly unable to compete in the job market. If it’s true that when you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere, I’d say if you are mentally disabled and toiling for Eunice Shriver, you, too, can make it anywhere.
At her death yesterday, that had been the life’s work of a morally driven and politically astute women who founded Special Olympics in 1968, an athletic program that would spring open doors worldwide for the mentally disabled while also opening minds that had been too long closed to accepting people with Down Syndrome or other intellectual disabilities.
My friendship with Eunice began in 1966 when I bumped into her--literally bumped into—during a Saturday afternoon three-on-three pick-up basketball game on her backyard court at the Timberlawn Shriver estate in Rockville, Maryland. I had begun working that year for Sargent Shriver at the Office of Economic Opportunity. Sarge Shriver had two jobs: toiling for Lyndon Johnson by day and for Eunice the rest of the time. They had the soundest kind of marriage: a union based less on being together than on working together. Sarge counseled me before that basketball game: guard her closely, she can be ferocious. Throw an elbow or two and go all out to win. The worse you beat her, the more she’ll like you.
It was full-effort people to whom Eunice Shriver devoted her life. Not far from the basketball court were three or four acres of a Bermuda grass lawn where she hosted dozens of mentally disabled children in free-form games of running, jumping and catching. Eunice gamboled among them--encouraging, prodding, congratulating but never pitying.
Two years after those lawn games at Camp Shriver, Eunice was at Soldier Field in Chicago doing the same at the first Special Olympic Games. Forty years later, it is the world’s largest sports program, embedded in the view that it’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you overcome.
It was at the Shriver home during small dinners, unfrenzied moments well removed from Eunice’s office at Special Olympics, and well away from her global travels to set up programs in more than 150 countries, that I came to know her. At mealtime, poking at her food was less an interest than poking at you for information: what have you been doing lately, where and when? She was an interviewer pressing to find out whether or not you were using your gifts well. I’d come away from those evenings thinking to myself, I need to become a better person. If she spoke at of herself at all, it was usually about phoning her brother Teddy that morning that it was time he held Senate hearings for a stronger bill for the mentally disabled.
Eunice and her Sargie, both innately kind, raised five loving and loveable children. Now in middle-life, they are fulfilling their mother’s wishes to “believe in possibility.” When Eunice turned 85 four summers ago, the children organized a Saturday birthday party. Playfully affectionate about their mother’s piety--a statue of the Virgin Mary stands a few paces from the front door of the Shriver home in Potomac--the gift of the evening, and which everyone received, was a t-shirt with their mother’s face below the line “St. Eunice.”
I’ve wondered often why no biography, nor even a New Yorker profile, has been written about this singular woman who has bettered the lives of uncounted millions of the otherwise rejected. Of late, we’ve had biographies of Sandra Day O’Connor, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Pearl Bailey and Gypsy Rose Lee (two of her, no less). Who’d be interested, apparently, in four or five hundred pages about a life of constancy with unglittery goodness and giving? Worse, she had just one husband, one faith and one mission.
No matter. Eunice Shriver never sought fame. She had no publicist, no agent, no handler. All she had was energy, of a kind that never stalled out. It was Olympian energy, special in its own grace.