When We Were the Kennedys

Monica Wood’s 2012 memoir, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine, is not an homage to the fabled First Family of the Camelot years, but to storytelling itself. In April of 1963, on a morning otherwise unremarkably routine, the author’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. His death left nine-year-old Wood and her family stunned with grief, and suddenly outside the norms of their town, where fathers in every family worked every day at the Oxford Paper Mill. In this “era of private mourning,” the Wood family kept their sorrow to themselves. Feeling estranged from others, young Monica found solace in stories, including, ultimately, the national story of loss occasioned by Kennedy’s assassination.

The first pages of Wood’s memoir document the small town that seems the whole world to Monica and her peers. Although arguably humdrum, the repetitive daily life of Mexico, Maine, instills in Monica a sense of security and certainty. Every morning, her mother fixes her father’s lunch and sends him off to work at the paper mill. Monica and her two sisters get ready for school. Monica is in fourth grade at her Catholic elementary school. Her younger sister, Cathy, is in second grade, along with her older, mentally disabled sister, Betty. They live on the top floor of a three-decker apartment building owned by curmudgeonly Lithuanian immigrants who reside on the first floor. Across the Irish Catholic town, millworker families are beginning their day in a similar fashion. Monica hears her downstairs neighbor, Norma Hickey, leave for work, as usual. Each day fulfills expectations until the day Monica’s father dies shortly after going out the door.

Something of a visionary, Margaret Wood has seen her husband’s death in dreams. But the anticipation doesn’t diminish her despair. She is so shattered, her daughters hardly recognize her as the Mum that so competently runs their household. To Monica’s relief, her twenty-two-year-old sister Anne, a high school literature teacher, rushes home and takes charge. Next arrives their older brother Barry. Married with kids and a millworker himself, he astonishes Monica when she witnesses him, a grown man, crying. The aura of Church authority surrounds Margaret’s younger brother, Father Bob, and makes him a minor celebrity in the Wood’s Catholic community. When Monica finds him sobbing in her bedroom, the day of her father’s death is even more jarringly incongruous with the world she’s accustomed to.



The next few days are crowded with neighbors, condolences, and casseroles. Margaret urges Uncle Bob, still distraught by his beloved brother-in-law’s death, to pull himself together; he manages to preside over the funeral. Albert Wood, Monica’s father, is survived by a colorful cast of relatives living in his native Prince Edward Island. Monica has never visited the Island, nor met her dad’s people, but she’s come to know them through her father’s lively stories of his past. After the funeral, Monica experiences her father’s “storybook characters” come to life when his Canadian family fills her kitchen. Moreover, now her dad is the character in their stories. As they share memories of him, Monica thinks, “Instead of being snuffed out like a spent cigarette, Dad’s expanding.”

Though their family identity has crumbled, the Woods carry on as best they can. Monica’s mother, avoiding her empty bed, wanders their small apartment at night but collects herself to make breakfast and get her girls to school. Then, she sleeps in their room. After school, their mother wakes and resumes her role as Mum, even, eventually, baking again. One day, she makes up her face to go to the bank to deposit the social security check. Thanks to FDR, she tells her daughters, she won’t have to scrub floors to support her family. With no family patriarch and no one to join the daily pilgrimage of fathers to the town’s “omnipotent” Oxford Mill, the Woods are conscious of their oddness. Feeling like a curiosity among her classmates, Monica survives the remaining school year by repeating to herself, “Look normal. Look normal.”

Summer arrives, and Monica immerses herself in books, looking more for instruction than entertainment. Reading Little Women, she studies how the March family adapts to life without their father. Then, downstairs neighbor Norma opens her Nancy Drew collection to Monica. She’s enthralled. Events in the world of the mystery series are solidly structured, if not predictable. The girl sleuth – red-haired like Monica – always discovers the answers to her questions. Monica starts to write her own detective novel, The Mystery of the Missing Man. When Monica learns her classmate Denise Vaillancourt also admires Nancy Drew, their friendship grows. A dinner invitation extended to Denise turns eventful when, confronted with the Lithuanian landlady barking, “NO BRING FRIEND,” she and Monica must use sleuth-like stealth to enter Monica’s building.



Meanwhile, Father Bob tries and fails to be a strong male figure for the family. Anxiety and alcoholism take their toll, and he ends up institutionalized near Washington D.C. The Woods are planning to visit him, and then President Kennedy is shot. Suddenly, the family’s private, indeed isolating, feelings of grief are part of a collective, national experience. They move forward with their trip to the nation’s capital, now the epicenter of mourning. Jackie Kennedy perseveres with grace after her husband’s death. Her loss mirrors that of Margaret Wood. As Monica Wood writes, “Jackie’s story made Mum’s bearable.” Eleven years later, Margaret succumbs to cancer, and the Oxford Mill closes amid labor disputes. Monica returns to Washington to study at Georgetown University.

When We Were the Kennedys is a quiet memoir of a mill family and their personal tragedy. In a 2015 interview, the author stated that a good memoir must “reach beyond the deeply personal.” Wood’s book transcends her own story of loss by showing how storytelling itself – family stories, mystery stories, national stories – can, as in the young Monica’s experience, “confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.” Stories can help us expand our worlds, even – perhaps especially – when they seem to be diminishing.