Kyle Kennedy, RFK’s Granddaughter, Dies at 42 After Years of Fighting Paralysis
Kyle Kennedy, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy who devoted her career to early childhood education and later became an advocate for people with disabilities after a spinal cord injury left her paralyzed, died on Sept. 21 at her home in Westwood, Mass. She was 42.
Her death was announced in an obituary posted by the Burke & Blackington Funeral Home in West Newton, Mass., and it drew wider attention this week as news outlets picked up the notice. The obituary said she died peacefully. No cause of death has been made public, and the family has not issued a statement addressing one.
Trending Now!!:
Ms. Kennedy was the daughter of Michael Kennedy, the sixth of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, and Victoria Denise Gifford. She was one of 34 grandchildren of the couple. Born in Washington in 1984, she spent most of her life in Massachusetts, including her early years in Cohasset, where her parents raised her and her younger sister, Rory Kennedy.
She earned a history degree from Georgetown University and went on to study at Pace University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After college, she taught in New York City through Teach for America, then built a career in Massachusetts around early learning and education reform, with a particular focus on disadvantaged children and people with disabilities.
In 2020, Ms. Kennedy suffered a severe spinal cord injury that left her with long-term paralysis and other medical complications. Public accounts have not detailed how the injury occurred. Her obituary said the years that followed were marked by struggle, yet she held on to her dry wit and determination. She became a vocal advocate for people living with disabilities, and her activism included testifying at a hearing at the Massachusetts State House on discrimination in health care.
She married Liam Kerr in August 2012. Her obituary refers to Mr. Kerr as her former husband. The couple had a daughter, Josephine Kerr, known as Josie, the twin of their son Conor Kerr, who died days after her birth. Ms. Kennedy kept her memory close for the rest of her life, the obituary said.
The notice described her as a devoted mother to Conor Kerr and Declan Kerr. It noted that she shared her home with two Wheaten terriers it called ill-behaved, an affectionate flourish in a notice that also praised her intellect, humor and beauty.
She is survived by her sons, Conor and Declan; her mother, Victoria Gifford Kennedy; her brother, Michael Kennedy Jr.; her sister, Rory; and several nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her father and by her daughter.
Her father, Michael Kennedy, died on New Year’s Eve in 1997 at age 39 after hitting a tree while skiing in Aspen, Colo. He had been playing football on skis with other relatives, a pastime the ski patrol had told the family to stop. Ms. Kennedy was 13. Mr. Kennedy, who ran Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit heating-oil program, and was widely viewed as a potential heir to the family’s political tradition, had been dogged that year by reports of an affair with a former family babysitter who was a minor at the time, an episode that effectively ended any hopes of elected office.
Ms. Kennedy’s death adds to a long list of losses in a family that has endured them across generations. Her grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, was shot in Los Angeles in June 1968 after winning the California Democratic presidential primary, and he died at 42, the same age at which she died. His brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Among her father’s siblings, David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel in 1984 at age 28.
The next generation has not been spared. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy and a student at Boston College, died of an apparent overdose at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 2019 at age 22.
In 2020, Maeve Kennedy McKean, a human rights lawyer and another granddaughter, disappeared with her 8-year-old son, Gideon McKean, after the two set out in a canoe on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to retrieve a ball that had drifted away. Ethel Kennedy, the family matriarch, died in October 2024 at age 96.
Over the decades, the repeated tragedies have fed popular talk of a Kennedy curse, a notion that Senator Edward M. Kennedy himself once raised publicly, wondering whether some awful curse hung over the family. Relatives have long resisted the idea, and many of them have turned their grief toward public service, advocacy and philanthropy.
Funeral arrangements have not been widely reported.
