Tragic Play

The week after I turned five, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My family and I were living in the deep south at the time, in a very small town named Batesville, Arkansas. This was like a foreign land to our family, a bunch of Roman Catholic Yankees from the Northeast. My dad had recently taken a job as a chemist in little Batesville, just before the start of my older sister's start of the school year for 6th grade. I wasn't yet in school, but mostly hung out at home playing with the neighbor boy and my little beagle dog, Tippy.

The day JFK was shot, my sister came home in tears. They had announced that the president had been shot and killed over the loud speaker in her school, and to her horror, celebratory shouts of joy rose out among the classmates and teachers at the word that the president was dead. She came home lost and confused to find our parents weeping and glued to the television set.

I remember very little about that time except the endless TV images on our grainy black and white set. I can picture clearly the living room and the family huddled around the TV and feel the emotional climate of my big sister and parents, even today when I think back to that moment -- a time when they felt so utterly saddened by the loss of the president, but so isolated and so all alone in a place in which they did not feel they 'belonged.'

What does this have to do with play? Lots. In my young barely 5-year-old brain, at some point over those endless days of watching images of the funeral for our young president, seeing his children who were about my age -- John John a little younger, Caroline a little older -- really had an impact on me. This was probably the first time I'd been exposed to death and the deep emotions that it caused others. On one of the days following the president's funeral, I packed one of my dolls in a little pink doll chest, and the neighbor boy and I covered it with a cloth, and we paraded up and down the street playing funeral. As I recall, I received such ridicule from my big sister and reactions of 'horror' from my parents later that day or perhaps at dinner, that I quickly learned that there are some aspects of play that should be hidden away from 'big people.' I was probably laughed at or made to feel what I did was shameful instead of taking it as a time to talk to me about death and what I might be feeling.

I remember sitting on our little stoop outside our carport in subsequent days and smashing ants and other bugs with my tennis shoe to watch them die and turning around sheepishly to make sure that no one saw me. I remember feeling curious, guilty, shameful, and like a 'bad girl.' But I also knew by then it was something no one should know about and there was no one I could talk to about my questions about death!