Starting Points: Ted Kennedy

Showing posts with label Ted Kennedy. Show all posts

Jun 9, 2010

Cough If You Need Sick Leave

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Americans shouldn't have to work when sick or lose pay, but is the aftermath of the Great Recession the right time to add another new business cost?

The short, lumpy red couch in Stili Klikizos' second-grade classroom at Milwaukee's Fratney Elementary School was meant for quiet-time reading. Now it's "the sick couch," a place for ill students to lie down as they await the bus that takes everybody home at day's end. "The parents work and will lose pay if they come get them," she told me as I sat on the couch. Thanks to her union contract, Klikizos gets 12.5 paid sick days a year. Many of her students' parents aren't so fortunate. "It crosses socioeconomic lines. Sometimes kids tell me not to even call, since 'Mom will get fired if she leaves.'" Last year, several couch-sitters were belatedly diagnosed with swine flu.

The no-show parents are among the 40 percent of the private sector who don't receive sick pay. Among full-time workers, 73 percent are covered by paid medical days. (Ninety-one percent have paid vacation, 89 percent paid holidays). The percentage is far lower on every count for part-time workers, though it's not just the motel cleaning lady or immigrant dishwasher who is scared to call in sick, see a doctor, or pick up a kid from school. Retail sales supervisors and information technology managers deal with the same domestic crises.

They all have a stake in the little-noticed debate over paid sick days now unfolding in Washington, state capitals, and cities, with strong arguments for change confronting the economic and political realities of a recession that makes employers nervous about any extra costs. In Congress, the proposed Healthy Families Act—one of the last bills sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy before he died—would guarantee as many as seven paid sick days a year for workers at companies with at least 15 employees. More than 30 million additional workers would be covered if it passes, including 6 million food-service and food-preparation workers who now have to either work when sick or lose pay. Consider that next time you're dining out.

Similar state and local proposals are launching debates in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City. Laws are already in force in San Francisco and the District of Columbia, with the constitutionality of Milwaukee's soon to be argued in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The face-offs echo those surrounding the Family & Medical Leave Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1993, with one side invoking morality and practicality and the other warning of dire economic consequences. The FMLA allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to deal with a serious health problem, birth or adoption of a child, or care for a family member. Its impact has been decidedly benign.

Under a city ordinance that passed in 2008, Milwaukee workers would be eligible for up to five sick days a year if privately employed in a business of fewer than 10 workers, and up to nine days at larger firms. An employer that already provides paid leave, notably personal days or vacation, might get a pass. Still, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce insists the change would kill jobs "by making Milwaukee a high-cost island in which to do business." It doesn't acknowledge the possibility that new employer costs might be outweighed by reduced turnover and recruitment expenses.

In San Francisco, both the Chamber of Commerce and the Golden Gate Restaurant Assn. had similar qualms before its law took effect in 2007. Kevin Westlye, the association's executive director, says members assumed that, given the city's high minimum wage ($9.79) and mandated health insurance, paid sick leave was "strike three." The first two mandates still rankle, but paid sick days "is the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?" The nightmare vision restaurateurs had of organized sickouts and staffers splitting "to go see the Giants play on a Friday," he says, hasn't panned out.

There's a pattern here. Washington declines to raise the federal minimum wage during hard times, and states tend to go ahead and do so. There's no question that the aftermath of the Great Recession is a tricky time to impose new costs, even if this is the right move for fairness and public health. It's a mistake for cities to "undertake a social justice agenda" and "ideologically impose" such mandates, says Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, which represents major businesses. She's convinced of ill effects from the pending New York City proposal yet doesn't deny a popular allure. There's a certain inevitability to paid sick leave; as even Wylde concedes, "Who can argue that somebody should be cooking in a restaurant with a contagious flu?" Let the lumpy red couch in Milwaukee be used for reading, not recuperating.

Warren is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Jan 13, 2010

In Massachusetts, Republican Brown steps up campaign for Kennedy's Senate seat

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By Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A01

Fueled by the energy of conservative activists, a solid debate performance and a 24-hour, $1.3 million Internet fundraising haul, Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown (R) has thrown a major scare into the Democratic establishment in his bid to win next Tuesday's special Senate election over once heavily favored Attorney General Martha Coakley.

The intensified activity around the campaign to fill the seat of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D) highlights the degree to which the race has taken on national significance. A victory, or even a narrow loss, by Brown in the competition for the symbolically important seat would be interpreted as another sign that voters have turned away from the Democrats at the start of the midterm election year.

More urgently, a Brown win would give Republicans 41 seats in the Senate and the ability to block President Obama's health-care initiative and much of the Democrats' 2010 congressional agenda. Strategists on both sides concede that a Brown victory would drastically reshape the calculus of the health-care debate, which is now in its final stages.

Brown still has some distance to go to pull off an upset, but Democrats now recognize they were wrong not to have taken his challenge more seriously from the start and are vowing not to let the race slip away out of neglect and a lack of aggressiveness.

"We believe at the end of the day the attorney general is going to win the race, but we're not going to take our foot off the gas," said Eric Schultz, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Eric Fehrnstrom, a top adviser to Brown, said: "I think it's a tight race, but Scott Brown still has to be considered the underdog. But clearly there's panic setting in on the other side, and they're jumping in with both feet."

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Democrats have buttressed Coakley's campaign this week, adding fresh money and personnel to her operation and vowing to go after the Republican far more aggressively than they have to date.

The DSCC bought $500,000 in advertising time for the contest, and national Democrats sent a pair of experienced strategists -- Michael Meehan and Hari Sevugan -- to Massachusetts to help lead the attack on Brown and oversee the final days of Coakley's campaign. Democrats also have sent fundraising e-mails from Obama and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

Brown countered by announcing he had raised $1.3 million in the previous 24 hours through an Internet appeal. A sizable portion of that money will pay for television ads that combat the Democrats' stepped-up attacks.

Polls have offered a muddled picture of the race. On Sunday, the Boston Globe put Coakley's lead at 15 percentage points. But that came after two automated polls, whose methodology is not always as reliable, showed a far closer contest -- one gave Coakley a nine-point advantage, the other showed a virtual dead heat.

On Monday, national Democrats released the results of an internal survey showing Coakley's lead at 14 points, but their actions since have belied the idea that she is comfortably ahead. A pair of internal polls taken for the parties showed the gap between the candidates in the mid-single digits.

Democratic strategists in Massachusetts and Washington said they remain confident that Coakley will prevail, given the huge Democratic registration advantage in the state and the attorney general's appeal to female voters. But they blamed Coakley and her campaign for letting up over the holidays and allowing Brown to change the dynamic of the race.

More than the Coakley campaign's performance may be at work in Massachusetts. Brown's operation benefits from the fact that Republican and conservative voters appear more motivated, as they were in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections in November. The accelerated activity by Democrats is designed in part to mobilize party voters and remind them of the stakes in Tuesday's balloting.

Coakley and Brown held their last debate Monday night, and while no clear winner emerged, Brown most often appeared to be taking a more aggressive posture. The two traded accusations on taxes, health-care reform and economic policy, with Coakley charging that Brown would take the country back to the economic policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Brown challenged Coakley, who opposes Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, on national security and terrorism, arguing that she was wrong to support the administration's decision to try self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court. After the debate, he also criticized Coakley for declaring that terrorists "are gone" from Afghanistan in explaining her support for an exit strategy.

Hoping to appeal to Massachusetts's long Democratic tradition, the Coakley camp began running a negative ad Monday attacking Brown as someone who would march "in lockstep with Washington Republicans." He responded Tuesday with his own ad in which he said she had decided "that the best way to stop me is to tear me down" and called on voters to reject her tactics.

Aug 29, 2009

President Obama's Remarks at Sen. Ted Kennedy's Funeral - washingtonpost.com

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The text of President Obama’s eulogy for Edward M. Kennedy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica.

Boston, Mass. — Mrs. Kennedy, Kara, Edward, Patrick, Curran, Caroline, members of the Kennedy family, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:

Today we say goodbye to the youngest child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy. The world will long remember their son Edward as the heir to a weighty legacy; a champion for those who had none; the soul of the Democratic Party; and the lion of the United States Senate — a man whose name graces nearly 1,000 laws, and who penned more than 300 laws himself.

But those of us who loved him, and ache with his passing, know Ted Kennedy by the other titles he held: Father. Brother. Husband. Uncle Teddy, or as he was often known to his younger nieces and nephews, “The Grand Fromage,” or “The Big Cheese.” I, like so many others in the city where he worked for nearly half a century, knew him as a colleague, a mentor, and above all, a friend.

Ted Kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch; the restless dreamer who became its rock. He was the sunny, joyful child, who bore the brunt of his brothers’ teasing, but learned quickly how to brush it off. When they tossed him off a boat because he didn’t know what a jib was, six-year-old Teddy got back in and learned to sail. When a photographer asked the newly-elected Bobby to step back at a press conference because he was casting a shadow on his younger brother, Teddy quipped, “It’ll be the same in Washington.”

This spirit of resilience and good humor would see Ted Kennedy through more pain and tragedy than most of us will ever know. He lost two siblings by the age of sixteen. He saw two more taken violently from the country that loved them. He said goodbye to his beloved sister, Eunice, in the final days of his own life. He narrowly survived a plane crash, watched two children struggle with cancer, buried three nephews, and experienced personal failings and setbacks in the most public way possible.

It is a string of events that would have broken a lesser man. And it would have been easy for Teddy to let himself become bitter and hardened; to surrender to self-pity and regret; to retreat from public life and live out his years in peaceful quiet. No one would have blamed him for that.

But that was not Ted Kennedy. As he told us, “...[I]ndividual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in — and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves.” Indeed, Ted was the “Happy Warrior” that the poet William Wordsworth spoke of when he wrote:

As tempted more; more able to endure,

As more exposed to suffering and distress;

Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.

Through his own suffering, Ted Kennedy became more alive to the plight and suffering of others — the sick child who could not see a doctor; the young soldier sent to battle without armor; the citizen denied her rights because of what she looks like or who she loves or where she comes from. The landmark laws that he championed -- the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, immigration reform, children’s health care, the Family and Medical Leave Act –all have a running thread. Ted Kennedy’s life’s work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections. It was to give a voice to those who were not heard; to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity; to make real the dream of our founding. He was given the gift of time that his brothers were not, and he used that gift to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow.

We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature, in support of health care or workers’ rights or civil rights. And yet, while his causes became deeply personal, his disagreements never did. While he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod, that is not the prism through which Ted Kennedy saw the world, nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw Ted Kennedy. He was a product of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect – a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots.

And that’s how Ted Kennedy became the greatest legislator of our time. He did it by hewing to principle, but also by seeking compromise and common cause — not through deal-making and horse-trading alone, but through friendship, and kindness, and humor. There was the time he courted Orrin Hatch’s support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program by having his Chief of Staff serenade the Senator with a song Orrin had written himself; the time he delivered shamrock cookies on a china plate to sweeten up a crusty Republican colleague; and the famous story of how he won the support of a Texas Committee Chairman on an immigration bill. Teddy walked into a meeting with a plain manila envelope, and showed only the Chairman that it was filled with the Texan’s favorite cigars. When the negotiations were going well, he would inch the envelope closer to the Chairman. When they weren’t, he would pull it back. Before long, the deal was done.

It was only a few years ago, on St. Patrick’s Day, when Teddy buttonholed me on the floor of the Senate for my support on a certain piece of legislation that was coming up for vote. I gave him my pledge, but expressed my skepticism that it would pass. But when the roll call was over, the bill garnered the votes it needed, and then some. I looked at Teddy with astonishment and asked how he had done it. He just patted me on the back, and said “Luck of the Irish!”

Of course, luck had little to do with Ted Kennedy’s legislative success, and he knew that. A few years ago, his father-in-law told him that he and Daniel Webster just might be the two greatest senators of all time. Without missing a beat, Teddy replied, “What did Webster do?”

But though it is Ted Kennedy’s historic body of achievements that we will remember, it is his giving heart that we will miss. It was the friend and colleague who was always the first to pick up the phone and say, “I’m sorry for your loss,” or “I hope you feel better,” or “What can I do to help?” It was the boss who was so adored by his staff that over five hundred spanning five decades showed up for his 75th birthday party. It was the man who sent birthday wishes and thank you notes and even his own paintings to so many who never imagined that a U.S. Senator of such statue would take the time to think about someone like them. I have one of those paintings in my private study – a Cape Cod seascape that was a gift to a freshman legislator who had just arrived in Washington and happened to admire it when Ted Kennedy welcomed him into his office the first week he arrived in Washington; by the way, that’s my second favorite gift from Teddy and Vicki after our dog Bo. And it seems like everyone has one of those stories – the ones that often start with “You wouldn’t believe who called me today.”

Ted Kennedy was the father who looked after not only his own three children, but John’s and Bobby’s as well. He took them camping and taught them to sail. He laughed and danced with them at birthdays and weddings; cried and mourned with them through hardship and tragedy; and passed on that same sense of service and selflessness that his parents had instilled in him. Shortly after Ted walked Caroline down the aisle and gave her away at the altar, he received a note from Jackie that read, “On you the carefree youngest brother fell a burden a hero would have begged to been spared. We are all going to make it because you were always there with your love.”

Not only did the Kennedy family make it because of Ted’s love – he made it because of theirs; and especially because of the love and the life he found in Vicki. After so much loss and so much sorrow, it could not have been easy for Ted to risk his heart again. That he did is a testament to how deeply he loved this remarkable woman from Louisiana. And she didn’t just love him back. As Ted would often acknowledge, Vicki saved him. She gave him strength and purpose; joy and friendship; and stood by him always, especially in those last, hardest days.

We cannot know for certain how long we have here. We cannot foresee the trials or misfortunes that will test us along the way. We cannot know God’s plan for us.

What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose, and love, and joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. We can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures. And we can strive at all costs to make a better world, so that someday, if we are blessed with the chance to look back on our time here, we can know that we spent it well; that we made a difference; that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of other human beings.

This is how Ted Kennedy lived. This is his legacy. He once said of his brother Bobby that he need not be idealized or enlarged in death because what he was in life, and I imagine he would say the same about himself. The greatest expectations were placed upon Ted Kennedy’s shoulders because of who he was, but he surpassed them all because of who he became. We do not weep for him today because of the prestige attached to his name or his office. We weep because we loved this kind and tender hero who persevered through pain and tragedy – not for the sake of ambition or vanity; not for wealth or power; but only for the people and the country that he loved.

In the days after September 11th, Teddy made it a point to personally call each one of the 177 families of this state who lost a loved one in the attack. But he didn’t stop there. He kept calling and checking up on them. He fought through red tape to get them assistance and grief counseling. He invited them sailing, played with their children, and would write each family a letter whenever the anniversary of that terrible day came along. To one widow, he wrote the following:

“As you know so well, the passage of time never really heals the tragic memory of such a great loss, but we carry on, because we have to, because our loved one would want us to, and because there is still light to guide us in the world from the love they gave us.”

We carry on.

Ted Kennedy has gone home now, guided by his faith and by the light of those that he has loved and lost. At last he is with them once more, leaving those of us who grieve his passing with the memories he gave, the good that he did, the dream he kept alive, and a single, enduring image – the image of a man on a boat; white mane tousled; smiling broadly as he sails into the wind, ready for whatever storms may come, carrying on toward some new and wondrous place just beyond the horizon. May God Bless Ted Kennedy, and may he rest in eternal peace.

Aug 27, 2009

After Diagnosis, Ted Kennedy Determined to Make a ‘Good Ending’ - NYTimes.com

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By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — The once-indefatigable Ted Kennedy was in a wheelchair at the end, struggling to speak and sapped of his energy. But from the time his brain cancer was diagnosed 15 months ago, he spoke of having a “good ending for myself,” in whatever time he had left, and by every account, he did.

As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD.

He began each morning with a sacred rite of reading his newspapers, drinking coffee and scratching the bellies of his beloved Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, on the front porch of his Cape Cod house overlooking Nantucket Sound.

If he was feeling up to it, he would end his evenings with family dinner parties around the same mahogany table where he used to eat lobster with his brothers.

He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“There were a lot of joyous moments at the end,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, Mr. Kennedy’s former Senate chief of staff, who oversaw his medical care. “There was a lot of frankness, a lot of hugging, a lot of emotion.”

Obviously, Dr. Horowitz added, there were difficult times. By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority.

But interviews with close friends and family members yield a portrait of a man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones.

Befitting the epic life he led, Mr. Kennedy was the protagonist of a storybook finale from the time of his diagnosis in May 2008. It was infused with a beat-the-clock element: his illness coincided with the debate over health care (“the cause of my life”) and the election of a young president he championed.

Mr. Kennedy raced to complete his legislative work and his memoirs (“I’ve got to get this right for history,” he kept saying), leaned heavily on his faith, enjoyed (or endured) a procession of tributes and testimonials and just recently petitioned Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts to push for a speedy succession so his Senate seat would not be vacant long.

The knowledge that his death was approaching infused Mr. Kennedy’s interactions with special intensity, his friends say.

“He was the only one of the Kennedy boys who had a semi-knowledge that his end was near,” said Mike Barnicle, the former Boston Globe columnist and an old friend who lives nearby on Cape Cod and visited the senator this summer. “There was no gunman in the shadows, just an M.R.I. It was a bad diagnosis, but it allowed for the gift of reflection and some good times.”

Even as Mr. Kennedy’s physical condition worsened over the summer, he still got out of bed every day until Tuesday, when he died in the evening, said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate.

“I’m still here,” Mr. Kennedy would call colleagues out of the blue to say, as if to refute suggestions to the contrary. “Every day is a gift,” was his mantra to begin conversations, said Peter Meade, a friend who met Mr. Kennedy as a 14-year-old volunteer on Mr. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign.

Some patients given a fatal diagnosis succumb to bitterness and self-pity; others try to cram in everything they have always wanted to do (sky-diving, a trip to China). Mr. Kennedy wanted to project vigor and a determination to keep on going. He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

“He always admired people who took risks, like Teddy and Kara did,” Mr. Dodd said, referring to two of Mr. Kennedy’s children, who both beat cancer with bold treatments. And he vowed to work as hard as he could to lead a legislative overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“He was the irrepressible Ted Kennedy,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, who visited with his longtime colleague last week. “He was determined to get things done, but he also understood he had limitations.”

Mr. Kennedy deputized Dr. Horowitz, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to research all treatment options before deciding on an intensive regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — hardly a clear-cut choice with an almost inevitably lethal disease and a patient of Mr. Kennedy’s age. Some physicians assembled at Massachusetts General Hospital considered his tumor inoperable — and measured his likely survival time between six weeks and a few months.

Before he traveled by private plane from Cape Cod to Duke University Medical Center for his surgery in June 2008, Mr. Kennedy made sure to put his affairs in order — his will, his medical directives and even his legislative instructions, family members say.

On the way to the airport, he called two Democratic colleagues: Mr. Dodd, telling him to take over a mental health bill he had been working on, and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, instructing her to take over a higher education bill he had been shepherding.

“Barbara,” he boomed over the phone, “as if he was at a Red Sox-Orioles baseball game,” Ms. Mikulski said in an interview. Just days after the surgery, Mr. Kennedy began following up with Ms. Mikulski. “He was Coach Ted,” she said.

Mr. Kennedy took no comfort, friends say, in hearing how missed he was in Washington, or how in his absence he had been become something of a “spiritual leader” on issues with which he is identified, like health care. He kept in close touch with his staff and colleagues, and he was engaged in a running conversation with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, on the delicate subject of whether Mr. Kennedy would be available to vote.

Mr. Reid assured him that he would not ever ask him to come to Washington unless his vote was essential. (His disease and treatments made Mr. Kennedy vulnerable to infections, so wading into crowded areas was risky.) When a crucial Medicare provision came up last summer, Mr. Reid asked Mr. Kennedy if he could make it down.

Mr. Kennedy’s family and staff debated the issue until the senator ended it. “I’ll be there,” he said, according to a member of his staff who was involved in the decision. He received a standing ovation when he returned to the Senate floor, and the bill passed easily after he helped break a Republican filibuster.

Vicki Kennedy fiercely guarded her husband’s privacy, but Mr. Kennedy’s illness had an undeniably public component. His setbacks and hospital visits often drew news media attention. After his emotional speech at last summer’s Democratic Convention in Denver, it was disclosed that he had been suffering from kidney stones and had barely been able to get out of his hospital bed a few hours earlier.

He had to memorize the text of his speech because he struggled to see the teleprompter (his surgery had left him with impaired vision). The seizure Mr. Kennedy had at an Inaugural luncheon at the Capitol led his son Patrick to joke that his father was trying to overshadow Mr. Obama on his big day.

Mr. Kerry remembers Mr. Kennedy telling him on the Senate floor in March that he was having trouble preparing for an event he had been extremely excited for — throwing out the first pitch on opening day at Fenway Park.

While Mr. Kennedy typically told people he felt well and vigorous, by spring it was becoming clear that his disease was advancing to where he could not spend his remaining months as he had hoped, helping push a health care plan through the Senate.

He left Washington in May, after nearly a half-century in the capital, and decamped to Cape Cod, where he would contribute what he could to the health care debate via phone and C-Span. He would sail as much as possible, with as little pain and discomfort as his caretakers could manage.

He also told friends that he wanted to take stock of his life and enjoy the gift of his remaining days with the people he loved most.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said repeatedly, friends recalled.

Mr. Dodd, in an interview, said: “At no point was he ever maudlin, ever ‘woe is me.’ I’m confident he had his moments — he wouldn’t be Irish if he didn’t — but in my presence, he always sounded more worried about me than he was about himself.”

Starting in late July, Vicki Kennedy organized near-nightly dinner parties and singalongs at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The senator was surrounded in the dining room by his crystal sailing trophies and a semiregular cast of family members that included his three children, two stepchildren and four grandchildren. Jean Kennedy Smith, Mr. Kennedy’s sister, had rented a home down the street this summer and became a regular, too. Instead of singing, she would sometimes recite poetry.

Even as Mr. Kennedy became frustrated about his limitations, friends say his spirit never flagged. “This is someone who had a fierce determination to live, but who was not afraid to die,” said Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat and a Kennedy friend whose district includes Cape Cod. “And he was not afraid to have a lot of laughs until he got there.”

In recent years, friends say, Mr. Kennedy had come to lean heavily on his Roman Catholic faith. In eulogizing his mother, Rose Kennedy, in 1995, he spoke of the comfort of religious beliefs. “She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice stammering.

He attended Mass every day in the year after his mother’s death and continued to attend regularly, often a few times a week.

The Rev. Mark Hession, the priest at the Kennedys’ parish on the Cape, made regular visits to the Kennedy home this summer and held a private family Mass in the living room every Sunday. Even in his final days, Mr. Kennedy led the family in prayer after the death of his sister Eunice on Aug. 11. He died comfortably and in no apparent pain, friends and staff members said.

His children had expected him to hold on longer — Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick and daughter Kara could not get back to Hyannis Port in time from California and Washington.

But the senator’s condition took a turn Tuesday night and a priest — the Rev. Patrick Tarrant of Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Mass. — was called to his bedside. Mr. Kennedy spent his last hours in prayer, Father Tarrant told a Boston television station, WCVB-TV.

Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short.

“When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’ ”