The news of the death of Ted Kennedy hit me hard, even though we all knew it was coming. The last of the Kennedy brothers is now gone, precisely 45 years, nine months and four days after the line of demarcation of our era was drawn in Dallas.

It would be mere sentimentality to soliloquize about "the final eclipse of Camelot." That bus left the station a very long time ago, in the age of American disillusionment, somewhere between the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and Jacqueline Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Still, there is something in the death of the last of the brothers that nips at the idea of mortality for anyone who can remember where he or she was on Nov. 22, 1963.

One of the most remarkable and tumultuous eras of American history is starting to blink out. President Obama - whose presidency owes more to Ted and Caroline Kennedy than to anyone else - said Wednesday, "An important chapter in our history has come to an end."

The theme of today's TV talk shows will be that after a profoundly rocky start and a rocky enough mid-life, Ted Kennedy went on to become one of the most hard-working and effective members of the United States Senate. That there has been a kind of quiet redemption in that, and that the United States has been made a better place by the hard but not always glamorous legislative work that he has done.

I was about to write that I have never really succumbed to the "Kennedy mystique," but who can really say that with any honesty? The grace, beauty, wit and ironic detachment of JFK; Robert Kennedy sweeping his hair over his forehead before speaking stammeringly, fiercely and lyrically about the unfinished work of America; the utter resilience of Ted Kennedy in the face of burdens seemingly beyond the ability of any man, especially so imperfect a man, to bear. Think of the list of people Ted Kennedy had to bury and eulogize in the course of his 77 years, before he was himself released this last week. He was the only one of the four Kennedy brothers to die of natural causes.

Can anyone listen to JFK's inaugural address without experiencing - "for one brief shining moment" - waves of hope, sharp waves of loss? Or Robert Kennedy's unforgettable spontaneous speech, in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King?

There are plenty of people who profess to feel nothing but contempt for Ted Kennedy, particularly given Chappaquiddick. I'm not one of them. I have always felt a sense of sadness for what must have been the burden of being the last, and in some important respects the least, of the Kennedy brothers, constantly to be compared to golden brothers who, because they died so young, were already elevated to the American pantheon. To have to soldier on after two gifted and accomplished older brothers have been assassinated, with sufficient reason to fear he might be the third, especially if he pressed toward the pinnacle of American life. Add to this the relentless father, Joseph Kennedy, driving his sons to work and wench and win no matter what the cost. To wonder, in every crowd, on every street corner, what symmetry nut or copycat psychopath was concealing a loaded gun. To inherit the burden of being the family patriarch so young and out of order, without having ever sought that role, and being in many ways ill-equipped for the part.

Heartless people talk about the self-destructiveness of Ted Kennedy. I know a little about demons. It is not impossible, I think, to discern a sad but uncanny survivor behind all the erratic behavior. By running his presidential hopes off that bridge (July 18, 1969), in some horrible, almost unthinkable way, with irony worthy of Greek tragedy, Ted Kennedy arguably saved his life. Nobody condones what happened at Chappaquiddick. But it is way less interesting to cast judgment than to try to understand the appalling crucible of being Ted Kennedy. My friend the preacher, who knows something about demons, too, said, "There is no greater burden than being told you are a person of great potential."

My daughter was fortunate enough to attend last year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. She met the redoubtable Mrs. Clinton, somehow found the courage to tremble up alone and shake Madeline Albright's hand, and attended, with 84,000 others, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium. It was, for a child of 14, a crazy week of logistical chaos and continuous overstimulation, like going to a county carnival that took itself too seriously, featuring rides based on current events themes. She called me breathlessly at really odd hours to tell me she didn't have time to talk and then gave me some wild life-etching tidbit from her convention experience. A few hours after Ted Kennedy's surprise appearance (Aug. 25), she called me to summarize one of the headiest days of her young life. "I was so honored to hear Mr. Kennedy give his last public speech tonight, Daddy." I said, "We don't know that, honey. He may live a couple of more years, and probably he will speak to other groups." Replied my wise child: "No, Dad, you know exactly what I mean."

Even if his faults were obvious to anyone who cared to look, and one of them profoundly troubling even for those of generous and forgiving spirits, it is undeniable that the best energies of Ted Kennedy's life were dedicated to making America a better place to live, especially for the least fortunate among us, and to calling America to a higher sense of itself. He gave the best of himself for five decades to public service. His contributions to civil rights, voting rights, the rights and dignity of labor, and to our crazy-quilt search for a humane and affordable health care system entitle him to legislative immortality.

He was America's most prominent champion of those millions of people who have few resources and fewer advocates. He put it best (with the help of Theodore Sorenson) at the 1980 Democratic Party Convention, accepting bitter defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter, "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, the dream shall never die." You can hear the way he pronounced that sentence, can't you, and no matter how skeptical you are, or disenchanted with the Kennedys, it stirs that part of you which dreams of an America equal to its founding promise.

In what I regard as his greatest speech, delivered as a eulogy for his brother Robert, on June 8, 1968, Ted Kennedy spoke words that are equally appropriate for himself: "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life … He saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world."

(Clay Jenkinson can be reached by e-mail at Jeffysage@;aol.com or through his Web site, Jeffersonhour.org.)