How The Grieved Grieve

During her first public statement on the death of her husband, Charlie Kirk, Erika Kirk, said the following on Sept. 14:

“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife — the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.” Later in her remarks, she added, interspersing pronouns, “They should all know this: If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea, you have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country and this world.”

You … they.

Those are scary pronouns, irresponsible, haphazardly targeted, and if not used by a widow with two small children who lost her husband and their father so brutally, their use would be unforgivable.

But they were.

At Kirk’s memorial service, which filled State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Sept. 21— and what a truly ugly, shameless spectacle it turned out to be — the same Erika Kirk said this of the person who killed her husband: “That man, that young man … I forgive him.”

Who knows if she did or not. But the words themselves, as James Taylor once said, are nice the way they sound.

Months before, after Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota legislature, and her husband, Mark, who were assassinated, their children issued a statement at the funeral: “The best way to honor our parents’ memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else.”

The families of murdered political officials in America have to grieve … and have to grieve publicly.

We want grace from them; we understand if we get outrage.

After I heard Kirk’s comments at the memorial service, I was outraged.

What is wrong with the Right in America they would turn this into a rallying cry, an indictment against those who had nothing to do with it? Who issues threats, such bile, to mourn death when the world, their children, are watching?

One of ours, actually.

In 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy, hours after her husband was killed, was on a plane back to Washington. There was a change of clothes waiting for her. She was covered in blood. She wiped off her face, but she would later say, “One second later, I thought, ‘Why did I wash the blood off?’ I should have left it there; let them see what they’ve done.”

There’s that pronoun again: they.

She didn’t change.

That outfit, those clothes, the bloody ones, by the way, were deeded to the Smithsonian for display.

So we can see what they (we) did.

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, his widow, Coretta Scott King, said at a press conference that her husband “faced the possibility of death without bitterness or hatred” while still struggling “with every ounce of his energy to save” a sick society from itself. She then asked those “who loved and admired him to join us in fulfilling his dream.”

Also, in 1968, Ethel Kennedy was pregnant with her and her husband’s 11th child when her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. She didn’t say much after he died, at least not publicly, but what she did say was “Kennedys don’t cry.” It was reported, though, that after his death she installed a jukebox in her garage and played loud music day and night to drown out her sorrow. She was a tough woman, Ethel Kennedy, and she did not forgive … or forget. When her husband’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was up for parole, she said, “Bobby believed we should work to ‘tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.’ He wanted to end the war in Vietnam and bring people together to build a better, stronger country. More than anything, he wanted to be a good father and a loving husband. Our family and our country suffered unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man. We believe in the gentleness that spared his life, but in taming his act of violence, he should not have the opportunity to terrorize again.”

Four years later, George Wallace, who was then running for president, was shot in a mall parking lot in Laurel, Maryland. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital. At that hospital, Richard Nixon came to visit, which you might expect, but so did Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for president, which you wouldn’t.

Wallace was a racist.

“I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” Chisholm reportedly told Wallace. She later recalled that Wallace “cried and cried.”

Someone else came.

A woman in Colorado who had been in a skiing accident flew across the country to see Wallace — on crutches.

That woman: Ethel Kennedy.

Erika Kirk and the Hortman family should meet one another.

Let them “cry and cry” together.

It might help them.

It might help all of us.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, comedian and Iberian correspondent for The Progressive Populist. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color” is the follow-up to “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman.” He is also author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.