John Kennedy was 43 years old when he began his three years as president.  By comparison, Bill Clinton was 46 and Barrack Obama 47 at that same juncture in their lives. I was 22 years old on the day that Kennedy died.  Following is part of what I wrote in my journal on the day of Kennedy’s assassination:

November 22, 1963, Friday

          Today President Kennedy was shot in the head and killed.  …

          To follow the news commentators from the point where all that was know was that Kennedy and Governor Connally had been shot in Dallas up to the point where it was rumored that two Catholic priests said that the President was dead – all of this made me feel strange all over.  …  Kennedy’s body was placed in a bronze casket, and … was aboard the plane as Lyndon Johnson [also on the plane] was sworn in [before leaving Dallas for Washington] …. Jackie Kennedy stood by Johnson’s side as a sobbing woman judge administered the oath of office to Johnson ….[All of this is] hard to absorb on the same day in which it all happened.  The same night President Johnson met with cabinet members and congressional leaders in Washington.  Jackie and Robert Kennedy spent the night in the Naval hospital in Washington with President Kennedy’s body.

          He was certainly the most vigorous world leader of his time.  … Vigor is snuffed out and is no more.  What would he have done in another five years?  …  Would the South-North relation be different if Lincoln had lived?

          A vitally alive person has ended his chance to give to this old world.  A vitally alive lady is without her lifelong companion. ….  I think gapingly of the fact that my thrilling stay in this life will end sooner or later.  And then I think of a lot of things which are shadowy and cannot be given words to express ….  I can’t even think them straight.  … I’m tired.

I haven’t resolved premature death.  I reject a lot of the platitudes I hear at funerals of those who have died before their allotted three score and ten.  Here are a few deaths very personal to me that I don’t understand.   It’s a large part of my coming to terms with NOT KNOWING:

·       My Aunt Virginia, my mother’s beloved younger sister, who died in her early 50’s in the Orly Airfield crash that took the lives of 103 Atlantans, this on the day of my college graduation, June 3, 1962.

·       Mac Childress was a full-of-life McCallie student & camp counselor killed in 1964 (when taking a camper to catch a late-night bus) by a head-on crash with a wrong-way driver.

·       Greg Simmons, husband, father of five (ages 2  to 12), Christian leader in business and the arts, fell to his death in 1988 while leading some of his own children and a nephew on a hike on their farm in the mountains of North Carolina.  He was trying to skirt a bee’s nest and hit a slick spot along the side of a waterfall.