Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to social media Thursday to honor his mother, Ethel Kennedy, with a lengthy post praising her in part for inventing “tough love.”
Ethel Kennedy died Thursday at the age of 96, a week after she was hospitalized following a stroke.
RFK Jr.’s post came hours after his estranged wife, Cheryl Hines, and several members of the Kennedy family posted their own tributes on social media.
Still, he made up for the delay by making it longer than other tributes to his mother.
In the post, Kennedy said God blessed his mother with “a rich and eventful life,” saying, “even While she deteriorated over the past few months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her hair joie de vivre.”
Kennedy said that while his mother “took the joy out of every moment,” he admitted that for the past 56 years she had “longed for the day she would reunite with her beloved husband.” [Robert F. Kennedy Sr.].”
“She is now with him, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her ‘adopted’ Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice , Jean, Rosemary and Patricia.
“From the day she met my father, her new family noticed that she was ‘more Kennedy than the Kennedys.’ She was never more excited about the afterlife than when she thought she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters – all aptly named ‘Rusty.’”
Kennedy also recalled her “deep – almost blind – reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence for its clergy” and the way she was “in awe of America’s presidents” despite knowing them personally.
“She balanced her disdain for pretension and hypocrisy with a limitless tolerance for mistakes and errors in others,” he said, adding that “hThe sunny optimism eventually brought my shattered father back to life after his brother’s murder and then helped her children thrive after her husband’s murder five years later.”
In the post, Kennedy claimed that his mother “invented tough love” and “It could be hard on her children if we didn’t meet her expectations.”
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Still, he said she “was also fiercely loyal, and we always knew she would stand fiercely behind us when we were attacked by others.”
Kennedy concluded the post by saying that he acknowledges his mother “for all my virtues” and is “grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.”