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There were nine Kennedy children. Nine. The kind of large, ambitious, fiercely competitive family that seemed almost engineered to produce presidents, senators, and history. And for the most part, that is exactly what they did. But there was one among them who was different. One who didn’t run for office, didn’t chase power in the conventional sense, didn’t follow the path her parents had carefully drawn out for her.
She defied them. Twice. She chose love over family loyalty, chose England over America, chose her own life over the one they expected her to live. And then she was gone. 28 years old, a mountain in southern France, a small plane in a storm that the pilot should never have flown into. Her name was Kathleen. But everyone who loved her called her Kick.
And this is the story the Kennedy family spent decades trying to keep quiet. The girl they called Kick. Kathleen Agnes Kennedy was born on February 20th, 1920 in Brookline, Massachusetts. The fourth child and second daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife Rose Fitzgerald. She arrived into a family that was already defined by ambition and competition.
And the Kennedy father’s ironclad belief that his children were destined for greatness. All of them, in whatever form that greatness could take. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was a man who had built his own considerable fortune in banking, film, and real estate. And who had a vision for his children that was both specific and enormous. His sons would enter public life, politics, the great arenas where power was exercised and legacies made.
His daughters would support that project, marrying strategically, presenting the family with dignity, raising the next generation of Kennedys in the Catholic faith that was the family’s deepest inheritance. It was a clear and ordered vision. It did not particularly account for children who had ideas of their own.
The nickname Kick came early, said to stem from her irrepressible nature. A kind of contained energy that seemed to push against any attempt to still or quiet her. She played football with her brothers at Hyannis Port. She argued at the dinner table. She was, by every account of everyone who knew her, the kind of person who walked into a room and made it more alive simply by being there.
Friends of her brother Jack, who would later become the 35th president of the United States, noticed it immediately. Those two, Jack and Kick, were extraordinarily close. A friend once described the two of them together with Joe Junior as a triangle within the larger family. A charmed inner circle of the three sharpest, most magnetic Kennedy children.
The old man himself, Joseph Senior, considered them the ones who would write the story of the next generation. They were the pick of the litter, as one family friend put it. The ones who seemed to move through the world with a particular brightness. Kick was educated at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, then at the Noroton Convent of the Sacred Heart in Connecticut.
And then spent a year at the Holy Child Convent in Neuilly, France. She was not being raised for politics the way her brothers were. The Kennedy daughters were expected to marry well, support their husbands, and carry the family’s Catholic identity with care and devotion. But Kick had a mind that didn’t fit neatly into that expectation.
She was sharp, politically curious, interested in journalism, interested in the world. She absorbed everything around her and formed opinions about it with the confidence of someone who had grown up at a table where opinions were both expected and challenged. In 1938, everything changed. Joseph Kennedy Sr.
was appointed United States Ambassador to Great Britain, and the entire Kennedy family sailed for England. It was supposed to be a temporary posting, a prestigious diplomatic assignment for a man who had served in various government roles under President Franklin Roosevelt. For Kick, it became the beginning of a second life, one that her parents would spend years trying to reclaim her from.
She arrived in London at 18. She was not conventionally beautiful. She was described at the time as having mousy brown hair, an ordinary face, nothing that would turn heads on appearance alone. What she had was something harder to name, warmth, wit, a directness that the English found both startling and irresistible.
The British aristocracy, with its elaborate codes and careful surfaces, found her genuinely refreshing in a way they couldn’t quite account for. She was declared the debutante of 1938 by the English media when she made her formal debut at the Queen Charlotte’s Ball on May 12th, 1938. She dated David Rockefeller.
She cultivated friends in high society at a speed that astonished even her own family, quickly building a wide circle that spanned both the social and political worlds of pre-war London. And at a garden party in the summer of 1938, she met William Cavendish, Lord Hartington, known to everyone who knew him as Billy, and something shifted.
Billy was the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire and heir to one of the most ancient, most Protestant, most prominent aristocratic estates in Britain. He was quiet where she was loud, thoughtful where she was impulsive. He was, by temperament, almost exactly her opposite, and the connection between them was immediate and real.
They talked late into the night whenever they were together. They wrote to each other when they were apart. Something about the combination of her American energy and his English steadiness produced a chemistry that both of them recognized immediately for what it was, but there was a problem, not a small one. The Cavendishes were not just Protestant.
They were, historically, almost aggressively so. The dukedom had been built on anti-Catholic foundations going back centuries, and the Kennedys were not just Catholic. They were Irish Catholic with a faith woven so deeply into their family identity that it was almost inseparable from who they were. Rose Kennedy, in particular, was a woman for whom the church was not merely religion, but the organizing principle of her entire life.
A Kennedy marrying a Cavendish was, by the logic of both families, almost unthinkable. And yet the two of them kept thinking about it. Before any of that could resolve itself, Germany invaded Poland. September 1939, Britain declared war. Joseph Kennedy, who was deeply opposed to American involvement in the European conflict, recalled his family to the United States.
Kick, 19 years old and in love with a man she had just found, begged to stay. She was overruled. She sailed home with her mother and siblings, leaving Billy in London and the life she had just begun behind. She would spend the next four years trying to find her way back. And in those four years, she would show, for the first time, but not the last, exactly what she was made of.
Four years waiting. Back in America, Kick didn’t simply wait quietly. She attended the Finch School in New York and Florida Commercial College. She volunteered for the American Red Cross. And in 1941, she left school entirely and went to work as a research assistant for Frank Waldrop, the executive editor of the Washington Times-Herald.
It was the same newspaper where her brother Jack had briefly worked and where a friend named Inga Arvad wrote a widely read column called Did You Happen to See that profiled notable government figures. Kick helped with that column, then eventually took over some of its responsibilities when Arvad left the paper.
She also began writing her own bylined column, reviewing plays and films. She was good at it. She had a natural voice on the page, conversational, sharp, alive with the same directness that made her so compelling in person. She was also, clearly, not someone who was built for the kind of domestic life that was expected of her.
She wanted to write. She wanted to be in the world, not managing a household at the edge of it. She wanted England. The letters between her and Billy continued across the Atlantic. Both of them knew what the obstacle was, and both of them struggled with it genuinely. The problem was not simply religious sentiment.
It had practical and dynastic implications. The Devonshire dukedom’s succession had always passed through children raised in the Church of England. Billy’s father was willing to accept the marriage if Kick remained Catholic herself. But Billy felt the pressure of continuity too strongly to agree to that arrangement. He wanted any children they had to be raised Anglican.
For Kick, agreeing to that would mean something beyond a personal compromise. It would mean her children growing up outside the faith that was the very foundation of her family’s identity. For months, the impasse held. Priests were consulted. The Archbishop of Canterbury was involved on the British side. Joseph Kennedy Sr.
, who was more pragmatic than his wife, and could see the shape of a possible compromise, was working quietly behind the scenes to find some accommodation with the Vatican. In the spring of 1944, while all of this was unresolved, Billy ran for the historical Cavendish parliamentary seat in a by-election in West Derbyshire.
Kick threw herself into the campaign with a zeal that surprised everyone who watched it. She canvassed under a false name. She loved the strategy sessions. She was, in the middle of a religious and personal crisis, also discovering something about herself. She had a genuine passion for the mechanics of political life.
Billy lost the election by a wide margin, but the campaign itself had given Kick something real. In 1943, Kick found her way back to England, the only way available to her. The Red Cross was sending volunteers. She signed up, completed training at American University in Washington, and on June 25th, 1943, she sailed for London.
She arrived in a city being bombed. She arrived in a country at war. She arrived, in a very real sense, to pick up where she had been forced to leave off. She began working at Hans Crescent, a Red Cross club for military officers in London. Billy was nearby, serving with the Coldstream Guards. They resumed what they had started in the summer of 1938.
And now the question that had always been there couldn’t be deferred any longer. The religious impasse between the two families was real and serious. Extensive negotiations took place. Priests on one side, the Duke’s lawyers on the other. Both families trying to find a formula that would allow the marriage to happen without either party surrendering what mattered most.
No formula was found. In the end, Kick made a decision. She married him anyway. On May 6th, 1944, Kathleen Agnes Kennedy married William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, in a civil ceremony at the Caxton Hall register office in London. The witnesses were Billy’s extended family and Red Cross friends. The sole Kennedy present was Joe Jr.
, who was then serving in England with the United States Navy. Her mother was not there. Her father sent a telegram. Her siblings were in various corners of a war-torn world. Jack was still recovering in a hospital in the United States from injuries sustained when his PT 109 patrol boat was rammed in the Pacific.
The ceremony was quiet, quick, and legally binding. Kick was 24. Billy was 26. They had 5 weeks together before he was deployed to Normandy. Rose Kennedy was, in her own word, horrified. She did not attend. She did not send warm wishes. She later admitted that the marriage had filled her with grief and shame that she could not set aside.
Kick understood this. She had known what it would cost her with her mother. She had married Billy anyway. The summer that broke her open, the summer of 1944, was one of the most catastrophic periods in Kathleen Kennedy’s life, compressed into a span of weeks that would have undone almost anyone. Billy was sent to France in June 1944, days after D-Day, leading a company of the Coldstream Guards into the campaign to push the German forces back across Europe.
Kick remained in London. The German military, responding to the Allied landings in Normandy, intensified their bombing of the city with the V1 flying bombs, called doodlebugs by Londoners, because of the unmistakable buzzing sound their engines made before they cut out. When the engine stopped, the silence meant the bomb was falling.
Kick wrote in her diary about Londoners always listening for the engine first, and then for the silence, that eerie 12 seconds before impact that made the doodlebugs more terrifying than any conventional bomb. People weren’t listening for explosions anymore. They were listening for quiet. She lived through this.
She was building a life in the middle of it. As the new Marchioness of Hartington, she had made her first public appearance at the Bakewell Fair in August 1944, where she charmed the same Derbyshire constituency that had rejected her husband in the parliamentary by-election earlier that year. She was being accepted, slowly, warmly, by the world Billy would have led.
Then, on August 12th, 1944, Joe Kennedy Jr.’s plane exploded over the English Channel. Joe Jr. had completed his 25 required bombing missions and could have gone home. Instead, he volunteered for a highly classified special operation, a mission to destroy the launch sites of the V-1 bombs that were devastating London.
The plan involved flying a plane packed with explosives toward the target, arming the detonation system, and parachuting out before it reached its destination. Something went catastrophically wrong. The plane exploded prematurely while Joe Jr. was still aboard, somewhere over the Suffolk coast of England. He was 29 years old.
He had not needed to volunteer for that mission. He chose to. Kick went home to Hyannis Port to grieve with her family. She had lost a brother and the only Kennedy who had truly understood and supported her choice to marry Billy. Joe Jr. was the one who had stood next to her in the register office. He was the one who had argued her case within the family, who had made the journey to London to witness a ceremony their mother refused to bless.
She was bereft not only of a brother, but of her closest ally. And then, less than a month later, she received another telegram. On September 9th, 1944, William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, was killed in action in Belgium. He had been leading his company through the town of Heppen against German resistance, and a sniper’s bullet had found him.
He was 26 years old. They had been married for 4 months. They had spent fewer than 5 weeks together as a married couple before he deployed. He died having written to Kick from Brussels earlier that same month about the liberation of the city and how desperately he wished she could have been there to share the experience with him.
The Duchess of Devonshire, Billy’s mother, wrote to Kick afterward, telling her that she must never forget that Kick’s decision to marry Billy had given him complete happiness. That the marriage itself, however brief, had been everything he wanted. Kick did not publicly fall apart. The Kennedys didn’t do that.
She grieved in private, held herself together in public, and eventually returned to England. She spent the Christmas of 1944 with the Devonshires at Chatsworth, the great house that Billy would have inherited. She retreated briefly to a convent. She found her way, slowly, back to living. In the years that followed, her home in Smith’s Square in London became something of an informal salon, a gathering point for some of the most interesting minds in post-war British life.
Anthony Eden, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh. She moved through that world with the ease of someone who had earned her place in it, not simply married into it. She was Lady Hartington now. She was a widow of distinction. And she was, beneath all of that, still only in her mid-20s, still intensely alive, still looking for what came next.
The Earl and the second storm. In 1946, at a ball organized for the Commandos Benevolent Fund, a charitable event for veterans of the war, Kick met Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. He was 35 years old, distinguished, decorated for his wartime service with both the Commandos and the Special Operations Executive, and possessed of a fortune that was among the largest in England.
He also had a wife, Lady Olive Plunket, whose own struggles with alcohol had left the marriage in a state of collapse. At the time Kick met him, he was actively seeking a divorce. He was also, observers noted, in several important ways similar to Joe Kennedy Senior. Worldly, charming, accustomed to getting what he wanted, with a reputation that preceded him into every room he entered.
He was described as older, polished, and something of a rake. He was exactly the kind of man who drew both admiration and complication wherever he went. His estate, Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, was one of the largest private houses in England. His fortune was estimated at the time of his death at 45 million pounds.
Kick fell for him. The relationship deepened through 1947 and into 1948. She had expected, in whatever future she had imagined for herself at Billy’s side, the life of a duchess, deeply embedded in English public life. Peter offered something that drew on what she had discovered she loved about that world while also rekindling something she had never fully let go of.
The excitement of politics, of ambition, of being near the center of how things worked. He talked about political life. She thrived in those conversations. The man she had met at the Commandos Benevolent Fund Ball was in many of the ways that mattered to her the kind of person she could build something real with.
By early 1948, Kick had returned to America to inform her family that she intended to marry Peter Fitzwilliam after his divorce was finalized. The reception was exactly what she should have expected. Her mother was furious. Not only was Peter a Protestant, he was a married Protestant whose divorce was not yet complete, which was, in Rose’s calculus, somehow even worse than simply being the wrong faith.
Rose issued an ultimatum. If Kick went ahead with the relationship and the eventual marriage, she would be disowned and cut off financially. This was not an idle threat from a woman who had never entirely forgiven her daughter for the first time. Joseph Kennedy Senior was in Paris in May 1948. Kick, understanding that her father was the more pragmatic of her parents and historically the more likely to eventually soften his position, decided to fly to Paris to make her case directly.
If she could win her father’s approval or at least his reluctant acceptance, the path forward became something she could work with. Joseph had not liked Billy initially either, but he had made his peace. He had been the one to send the telegram when others sent nothing. Perhaps he would do the same again. She arranged to travel to Paris with Peter Fitzwilliam.
She would meet her father. And then, afterward, the two of them would continue south to the French Riviera for a few days of vacation before she returned to England. On May 13th, 1948, they were ready to leave. The storm over Ardèche. The aircraft was a de Havilland DH 104 Dove, a small twin-engine plane designed to carry passengers in relative comfort over short to medium distances.
It seated up to eight passengers in its standard configuration. On May 13th, 1948, the four occupants were Kick, Peter Fitzwilliam, the pilot Peter Townsend, and the navigator Arthur Freeman. They took off from Paris at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, heading south toward Cannes on the French Riviera. The weather in the region was poor, the kind of weather that experienced pilots knew to take seriously.
Accounts suggest that warnings had been available. The decision was made to fly anyway. At 10,000 ft, roughly an hour into the flight, radio contact was lost with the aircraft. The plane had entered the airspace near Vienne in the Rhône Valley, and it had entered the center of a severe storm. What followed lasted approximately 20 minutes.
The small aircraft was thrown by the turbulence with a violence that would have been terrifying, thrown upward and downward, by some accounts by as much as several thousand feet in a single gust. The four people aboard were, in those 20 minutes, at the complete mercy of of that had no mercy to give. When the plane finally broke through the clouds, the crew discovered in an instant that they were in a steep dive moments from the ground.
They pulled hard on the controls. The stress of the pull, the sudden reversal of direction against the force of the dive, was more than the aircraft’s structure could bear. One wing tore free, then the engines, then the tail. The fuselage spun toward the earth and came to rest nose down in a ravine on the Plateau de Coiron, near the village of Saint Bauzille in the Ardèche region of southern France.
All four people aboard were killed instantly. Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington, was 28 years old. Joseph Kennedy Senior was in the south of France when he received the news. He made the journey to identify his daughter. He was the only Kennedy at her funeral, which was arranged by the Cavendish family and held at Saint Peter’s churchyard in Edensor, Derbyshire.
The traditional Cavendish burial ground in the shadow of Chatsworth House. She was buried as Kathleen Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington, surrounded by the family she had joined over her own family’s objections in the country she had chosen as her home. Her gravestone reads, simply, joy she gave, joy she has found.
Rose Kennedy did not come to the funeral. She entered a hospital for medical reasons in the days surrounding it. Whatever the nature of those reasons, she was not there. Her brother Jack was in the United States. He was too devastated, by his own account, to be able to bring himself to attend. The Kennedy family, which had lost Joe Junior just four years earlier, had now lost Kick.
And the circumstances of her death, tangled as they were with a romance her family had disapproved of, meant that grief and shame arrived together, which is one of the hardest combinations a family can manage. In the aftermath, the family’s official account of what Kick had been doing on that flight downplayed the nature of her relationship with Fitzwilliam.
The Boston papers reported that the two had been mere acquaintances, and that Kick had simply accepted a ride because she had a pressing appointment in Paris. The family, with JFK’s political future already beginning to take shape, wanted no scandal attached to the name. They managed the story as best they could.
And for years, it worked. What she left behind. The epitaph on Kathleen Kennedy’s grave at Edensor reads, “Joy she gave, joy she has found.” It was chosen by the Devonshires. It is brief, and it says nearly everything. She is buried far from her family, in English soil, in a churchyard that belongs to a house and a family she chose over her own.
Her husband, Billy, is buried in Belgium, near where he fell. They are separated in death as they were separated so quickly in life. She was widowed in four months. She was dead in four years. And she was 28 when the plane went down in the south of France. 28 years old, with more life packed into those years than most people accumulate across a much longer span.
JFK visited her grave in the summer of 1963, making a deliberate detour from a diplomatic trip to Europe to stop at Edensor. He went alone to the churchyard. He stood at her grave. Whatever he thought or felt in those minutes, he kept to himself. He flew back into the currents of history that were carrying him, the Cold War, the presidency, all of it.
And later that same year, he was assassinated in Dallas. It was the last time anyone from the immediate Kennedy family stood at Kick’s grave. Three years after Kick’s death, Robert Kennedy named his eldest daughter Kathleen in her honor. The name has stayed in the family in various forms across the decades since.
One of the quiet gestures of a family that largely kept her story private while privately honoring her memory. The public story was carefully managed in the immediate aftermath. Joseph Kennedy Sr. with JFK’s political future already in early formation, ensured that the Boston newspapers reported the plane crash in terms that obscured the nature of Kick’s relationship with Fitzwilliam.
They were described as mere acquaintances. The crash was treated as a tragedy of proximity. She had simply been in the same plane as someone she barely knew. The implication of a serious romantic relationship with a married man was kept from the public record as effectively as a family of that reach and wealth could keep anything.
The result was that Kick essentially disappeared from the Kennedy narrative for years. The brothers were the story. JFK, Bobby, Ted. They were the ones who made history, who were elected and appointed, and eventually, in two of those three cases, killed in public. The sisters were present, but not primary. And Kick, who had died before JFK even entered Congress, who had lived her most consequential years in England, was the easiest of all to allow to fade.
She was in life the one who didn’t follow the prescribed road. Lynn McTaggart, who wrote a biography of Kick in 1983, described her as the only rebel among the nine Kennedy children. The only one who consistently chose her own path over the family’s agenda. That framing is perhaps slightly too simple. She was also someone who had genuine depth, genuine ambition, and a genuine gift for the kind of connection that draws people together across otherwise unbridgeable differences.
She was not merely a rebel. She was a person who knew what she wanted and was willing to pay the cost of wanting it. The costs were real. She gave up or risked giving up her mother’s love. Rose Kennedy’s threat to disown her if she married Fitzwilliam was not an idle one. She had already stepped outside the church’s laws by marrying Billy in a civil ceremony.
A second marriage to another Protestant, a married man whose divorce had not yet been finalized, would have put her even further beyond the Catholic life her mother had defined as the only acceptable one. Kick seems to have understood all of this. She was going to pursue Peter Fitzwilliam anyway. She was going to make her case to her father in Paris to at least begin the process of bringing the family along, the way her father had eventually made a kind of peace with Billy.
What she got in return for the costs she paid were the years themselves. The London she loved. The marriage, however brief, to a man who gave her complete happiness, according to the woman who knew him best. The friendship and respect of some of the most remarkable minds in post-war British life. A sense of herself that was fully her own, not assembled from her parents’ expectations or her siblings’ shadows, but built from her own choices, her own courage, and her own particular gift for making the world around her feel more alive.
She was the Kennedy who got away, the one who escaped the family’s orbit and built something real in a different country under a different name. That she died before she was 30, before any of it could fully settle into permanence, before whatever marriage she might have made with Peter Fitzwilliam could be tested by ordinary time, means that what we have is the bright part, the rising arc, the story of someone still becoming.
The letter she wrote to a friend sometime before she turned 25 contained the observation that life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage, and death before that age. She had already faced all three by the time she wrote it. She was speaking from experience, from a place of having survived things that would have reduced most people to grief and silence, and having continued anyway with the same energy and humor and defiance that had defined her from the very beginning.
She continued for three more years, and then, on a mountain in the south of France, she stopped. She had 28 years. She packed them. Her epitaph is right. Joy she gave, joy she has found, the silence and the memory. For a long time after 1948, the family kept Kick’s story largely out of the public narrative. There were reasons for this that were partly practical.
JFK was building a political career, and the circumstances of Kick’s death, involving a romantic relationship with a married man and a forbidden romance that her family had disapproved of, were exactly the kind of material that could be weaponized by opponents. The Kennedy family had no interest in adding to the complications they already faced as Irish Catholics trying to reach the Protestant establishment’s highest office.
There were also reasons that were personal and human and harder to name. The complicated grief of a family that had disapproved of her choices, watched her make them anyway, and then lost her before any of it could resolve or reconcile. Rose Kennedy’s relationship with Kick had never fully recovered from the marriage to Billy.
The church wedding that Rose had wanted, the Catholic blessing she had hoped for, the grandchildren who would be raised in the faith. None of that had happened, and none of it would now. The threat to cut Kick off if she married Fitzwilliam had been delivered, but never carried out. Kick died before it needed to be.
What Rose felt in the years after is something she kept largely to herself. She entered a hospital in the days surrounding the funeral and let the Devonshires bury her daughter in English soil. She outlived Kick by nearly half a century, dying in 1995 at the age of 104. Whatever she carried about Kick during those decades, she shared very little of it publicly.
Joseph Senior, who had been the one summoned to identify the body, who had stood at the grave as the only Kennedy present, who had always been slightly more flexible than Rose in his response to Kick’s choices, he mourned her for the rest of his life in a way that those around him described as genuine and deep.
He was reported to have said that of all his children, it was Kick who had the most of himself in her, the wit, the fearlessness, the appetite for living fully. Whether this is exactly what he said or a more polished version of something more broken, what the people around him observed was a man who had lost something he could not replace.
JFK’s grief is somewhat better documented. He had loved her not just as a sister, but as a peer. She was the one among his siblings who was most like him in temperament and in the quality of her mind. They had the same dark humor, the same capacity for genuine friendship, the same slightly detached observational quality that let them see the world as it was, rather than as they might prefer it to be.
The charmed triangle that a friend had described, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kick, had lost its first member in August 1944 and its second member in May 1948. Jack was, by the end of that terrible decade, the last of the three. He carried that weight for the rest of his life. The story of Kick Kennedy began to come back into public view through biographies.
Lynn McTaggart’s 1983 account was the first substantial one, and Barbara Leaming’s more recent biography, published in 2016, has brought her story to a newer generation with fresh perspective and new material. She has been portrayed in television adaptations of the Kennedy story across the decades since 1948.
Her grave at Edensor is visited by people who know who she was, and by some who stumble across the Kennedy name inscribed on a stone in an English churchyard, and go looking for the story behind it. What they find, when they look, is a life that is in some ways more interesting than the more famous lives that surrounded it.
The brothers became presidents and senators and martyrs. The other sisters married well, served well, became well-known in their own spheres. Kick became someone who chose, at every critical moment, herself. Who refused the marriage her family wanted. Who went back to the war to follow her heart.
Who stood in a register office with one brother and no mother and made her vows anyway. Who came home widowed and grieving and found her way back to living. Who looked at another impossible love and decided to pursue it without waiting for anyone’s permission. She had also written, in a letter to a friend before she turned 25, something that reads differently now than it would have when she wrote it.
That life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage, and death before the age of 25. She had already been widowed by then. She had already lost her brother. She was speaking from genuine experience, from a place of having already learned that the worst possible things can happen and that one continues anyway.
She continued for 3 more years. And then, on a mountain in the south of France, she stopped. Her epitaph is right. Joy she gave. Joy she has found. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel, so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
