A stay-at-home order to stop the spread of coronavirus prompted Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and her husband to self-quarantine with their three young children at her mother’s more spacious, empty waterfront home on Chesapeake Bay.
Now, social distancing means the famously tight-knit Kennedy family can’t grieve together in person for Maeve, 40, and her 8-year-old son Gideon, who are presumed dead after going missing in a canoe accident near the Shady Side, Maryland home last Thursday.
“This is such a horrible time to lose somebody. Everyone’s trying to be careful,” a family friend told People. Family members are doing their best to console one another by “having daily Zoom calls,” the friend said. They are also trying to figure out how to one day hold a memorial service.
“There will be a memorial service at some point in the future,” the family friend added.
Maeve’s mother is Maryland’s former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Maeve also is the grandniece of former President John F. Kennedy and was the executive director of the Georgetown University Global Health Initiative. She and her husband, David McKean, met while she worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and they shared two other children, Gabriella, 7, and Toby, 2 1/2.
David McKean called Maeve his “everything” in a Facebook post, People reported.
“She was my best friend and my soulmate,” David McKean wrote. “You could hear Maeve’s laugh a block away—and she laughed a lot. She was magical—with endless energy that she would put toward inventing games for our children, taking on another project at work or in our community, and spending time with our friends.”
McKean said his son Gideon was “a compassionate” boy who was “incredibly social, athletic, and courageous.”
Last Thursday afternoon, Maeve and Gideon were playing kickball by a small, shallow cove behind the house, David McKean said. He said that one of them kicked the ball into the water, and together they got into the canoe to retrieve the ball. But somehow, the canoe got pushed by the wind or tide into the open bay.
A close family friend, Alan H.H. Fleischmann, told the Washington Post that neither was wearing a life jacket, thinking they would be in the canoe only a minute or two. He said that Maeve apparently underestimated the wind, which was gusting at about 30 mph. The strong undertow also pulled the canoe into the bay and into two- to three-foot-high waves.
Someone called police around 4:30 p.m. Thursday to say he saw the canoe from the Columbia Beach pier. The Coast Guard said mother and son were “seen struggling to return to shore in a canoe” and then not seen again.
The deaths of Maeve and her son Gideon marks the latest tragedy to strike the extended Kennedy family and the descendants of Joseph Kennedy Sr. and his wife, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The Kennedys endured the assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963 and of Maeve’s grandfather, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, while he was running for president.
But over the decades, the family has also grieved for family members lost to plane crashes, drug overdoses and other accidents.
JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, died when the small plane he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic off Massachusetts in 1999. More than than 50 years earlier, JFK’s oldest brother, Joe Kennedy Jr., died in an aircraft explosion while flying on a World War II bombing mission in France. In 1948, JFK’s sister, Kathleen Kennedy, died in a small plane crash in France at the age of 28.
In 1984, David Kennedy, Maeve’s uncle and one of Ethel and RKF’s 11 children, died in a Florida hotel after a drug overdose. He was reportedly traumatized by his father’s violent death, the Washington Post said. Michael Kennedy, another of RKF’s sons, died in 1997 during a ski accident in Colorado on New Year’s Eve.
Most recently, another of RFK’s granddaughters, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died in August 2019 of a suspected drug overdose at age 22 while visiting the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy Hill had been open about her longtime mental health struggles, writing in a high school newspaper essay in 2016 about dealing with depression.
Maeve’s mother, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, reflected on her father’s death following the loss of her daughter, according to People.
“When my Uncle Ted eulogized my father, he offered a prayer that what daddy was to his family, and what he wished for others, would someday come to pass for all the world. This is our prayer for Maeve and Gideon,” the former lieutenant governor wrote in a statement to People.
“Our hearts are crushed, yet we shall try to summon the grace of God and what strength we have to honor the hope, energy and passion that Maeve and Gideon set forth into the world,” she wrote. “My family thanks all for the outpouring of love and prayers as we grieve and try to bear this devastating loss.”