KENNEDY TRAGEDY EVOKES AN OLD WORLD UNDERSTANDING

The Kennedy family conducted private funeral services for John F. Kennedy, Jr., but his death remains unavoidably public, especially in his New York City neighborhood. There the response evokes memories of how tragedy was understood in the villages our grandparents may have come from. PNS commentator Mark Schurmann lives and writes in New York City.

The death of JFK Jr. is a particular kind of tragedy.

Littleton might have shocked Americans with its unpredictability, the age and look of its killers, but the death of another Kennedy hits home in a deeper way.

In the face of tragedy, we usually want to know who is to blame, whom we point a finger at, what laws we can pass to prevent such a tragedy from happening again?

This kind of blame game can't and won't be played at the funeral of JFK Jr. There is a memorial at the base of his apartment building on North Moore St., in a celebrity-filled neighborhood in downtown NYC. You take the 2 or 3 train downtown, get off at Chambers Street and follow the people dressed in their Sunday best with yellow roses in their arms and somber looks on their faces.

Days after his death was announced, people still come to pay their respects. Even those who are just curious find something to give like a silent prayer or a small candle. It's an old fashioned wake and people celebrate his life while mourning his death. It's a sad thing that's happened and sadder still in the context of the Kennedy family history.

It seems that John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death takes us back as Americans to whatever villages our grandfathers and grandmothers might have come from -- in Ireland, Germany or Mexico or maybe Vietnam -- where this kind of tragedy is understood and accepted with grace and dignity. There's no scapegoat and no solutions to this kind of death.

I'm too young to remember the assassination of Kennedy Sr. and I wonder even now why I seem to care about this story -- perhaps it would be more level-headed, cooler, to not care or to just shrug my shoulders as I did when Princess Diana died. But there's too much magic in this one, too much history. And I can't help but think of my own mortality when I see the face of Kennedy Jr. in the paper or on TV.

I admired him -- his looks, his wealth, and his grace. He seemed to photograph better than most of his neighbors in the movie business. I can imagine the burden of growing into manhood under the shadow of his father's and his uncle's achievements, the constant glare of public curiosity. He seemed to bear it well, gallantly, as his mother taught him.

This Kennedy belonged to New York City, was well suited to it. In the magnificent gilded 1990s, where wealth has gone up and crime down, he blossomed into the city's number one gentleman.

In the end the most compelling thing is the relationship of the son to the father, even in death, especially in death. Kennedy fulfilled his role in the story.

America shakes it's head and sighs with regret and acknowledges, deep down, those feelings passed down through the generations, that knowledge that comes from the village in the old world, where such stories and their endings are known and remembered.