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The hearse carrying the casket of Sen. Edward Kennedy passes through Boston en route to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Thursday.

A Kennedy has died, and diagrams of brains appear, once again, on the evening news. They're in 3D now and in color, and tell of tumors rather than entry wounds, but the effect is jarringly mindful of 1963 and '68, when we all died a little, no one more than Ted.

When JFK was murdered, I remember taking my dog Peter for a long walk to neighborhoods I'd never been in, while my stunned parents watched the drums on our black and white TV. When Bobby died five years later, I was with wiseguys in the middle of a high school graduation rehearsal, and the only people crying were girls and poetry teachers.

Assassinations were becoming routine by then. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed. Malcolm X. Stick your neck out and get your head blown off was the message, and what was he doing out there running for president anyway? Then came Kent State and the cork went on the bottle for good.

Crying? I don't think so. Rage, I'll give you that.

But Wednesday night I cried for the Kennedys. I know I've seen it a hundred times - Ted's eulogy at Bobby's funeral - but Wednesday night I finally heard it.

Anything you need to know about courage is present in that speech, where he fights so hard not to break down, when everyone around him and millions in the street are wailing in grief. Ted's voice, quavering but never stronger, holds forth, saying of his brother, "He saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

Could any of us have done that - and gotten through it? Big bruisers of the NFL bawl their heads off at the press conferences announcing their retirement - and here's Ted, holding back a flood of tears. But there's defiance here, too, and anger. Emotions tear at every piece of him, and still he holds on.

It is the greatest of all Kennedy speeches. It goes beyond JFK's "Ask what you can do for your country" speech by starkly reminding us of the risk inherent in that rhetoric. The risk is still worth it, he tells us, and almost imperative.

What if he had collapsed on that podium and had to be carried off by his sisters? That would have been acceptable, right? Or would that have destroyed the rest of us completely? Because Kennedy-ism has always been about carrying on, the dream that never dies. Ted Kennedy understood his responsibility to the rest of us, this cross he somehow had to bear, in a country that eats its young.

If he retired at 37 to sail around the world, would anyone have blamed him? He still would have made headlines, of course, but they would have been rock star headlines, not about health care reform.

Instead, he took care of his family, of his brothers' families, and did what he was supposed to do: he took care of us, as if it were written somewhere back there in Joe Kennedy's bible.

He took 10 weeks off after Bobby's murder and walked the beach with his kids. In an interview during that time with mother Rose at his side, he spoke of what family members hoped to do "this summer and in future summers. I know we'll choose wisely."

The following summer, the reckless time of Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne, seemed to fly in the face of that.

Of his many faults, he said, "I am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them."

Would any of us, at the age of 37, having had to endure a life like Ted's, not have driven a car off a bridge? We all think we have a pretty good idea what happened that night, but even Kennedy said that his behavior during and after the accident "makes no sense to me at all."

He is the only Kennedy brother who's had to apologize for personal behavior, more than once, and who's promised publicly to become a better person. He believed in hope and the power of love, and found it again, in "an extraordinary awakening" with his second wife, Vicki.

The tragedy of the Kennedys is one that we'll never know. We'll bury our loved ones, and unspeakable heartache will sometimes brush against our cheeks, but Ted's broken heart was of a different kind. Not only was he forced to absorb the pain of millions, but he followed an unspoken decree that no Kennedy may stay heartbroken for very long.

"There's no safety in hiding," he said upon resuming his political career, sustained, he said, by the priceless years spent with his brothers.

He thought of himself as an activist and fought the activist's fight, often a lone voice railing for health care, housing, justice. It was Ted who fought the fight for civil rights, long after the Civil Rights Act passed. His brothers lived long enough to recognize the sin of racism, but it was Ted who devoted his life to its eradication. He lived to hear a black president hail him as the "Lion of the Senate" to his face.

Ted Kennedy saw something his brothers never even got a whiff of - old age. He lived, and worked robustly until his death at age 77, when many people retire at 65. Like many in old age, he faced a dreaded disease, and showed us how to do that too.

"He was in fighting form," his wife Vicki told us of his sailing adventures while tumors gnarled in his brain.

It's the voice we'll miss most. His was the most authentic of Kennedy voices, mistakenly referred to as a Boston accent by the rest of the country. But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in Boston who actually talked like a Kennedy. It was sort of an old Irish/Brahmin dialect passed down from Honey Fitz, the mayor of Boston, to his daughter, Rose Kennedy, and funneled through Harvard. It ends with Ted. None of the next generation talks anything like that.

For me, the moment that captures Ted Kennedy in his fightingest form is the speech he belted out at the Democratic National Convention in 1988. In full command of his lungs and liberated, finally, from the burden of seeking the presidency, he was turned loose as prime-time attack dog for other nominees, in this case Michael Dukakis.

He lambasted the Republican candidate, Vice President George H.W. Bush - who claimed to have not been present at a number of key meetings in Reagan's White House, including deliberations on the Iran/Contra affair - with the now legendary "Where was George?" refrain. "He was the man who was NEVER theah!" Kennedy concluded, bringing the house down with: "AND HE WON'T BE THEAH WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES NOON ON JAN. 20, 1989!"

Whether or not Democrats would ever retake the White House, that speech, that night, was just as good as victory.

Bob Flaherty can be reached at bflaherty@gazettenet.com.