02/13/2026
On May 23, 1994, John F. Kennedy Jr., age 33, leaned over his mother's mahogany casket at Arlington National Cemetery, his hand resting on the polished wood as if he could somehow keep her here a little longer, and what makes this photograph unbearably heartbreaking is not just the visible grief of a son burying his mother but the knowledge that Jackie Kennedy Onassisâwho'd survived her husband's assassination, raised two children under impossible scrutiny, rebuilt her life as a book editor, and became arguably the most admired woman of the 20th centuryâhad died just four days earlier on May 19, 1994, at age 64, from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that she'd kept private until the very end, maintaining the dignified silence that had defined her life since Dallas. The burial was deliberately small, only 64 people invited to witness Jackie being laid to rest beside President Kennedy and their two infant children, Patrick and Arabella, reuniting a family that tragedy had scattered across decades, and John Jr.âwearing a dark suit with a small purple ribbon (Jackie's favorite color) in his lapelâperformed the final act of love by placing his hand on her casket, a gesture photographer Greg Gibson captured that would become one of the most intimate portraits of grief in American history. What haunts anyone looking at this image now is the cruel mathematics of Kennedy mortality: John Jr. would himself die just five years and 54 days later on July 16, 1999, when his plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard, killing him, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, ending the Kennedy line that had begun with such promise and been cut down with such savage regularity that it felt less like coincidence than curse, leaving only Caroline to carry the weight of Camelot's memory forward alone.