Edward Kennedy pushed for Kara Kennedy’s extra years

By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff

That Kara Kennedy died at age 51, leaving behind two teen-age children, one of whose birthday is today, is the latest tragedy to befall her prominent political family.

That she survived the past nine years after being diagnosed with supposedly inoperable lung cancer is a tribute to but one member: her late father, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

With characteristic zeal and a stubbornness he displayed in fighting his own terminal brain cancer, the senator refused to accept the initial diagnosis in 2002 from the doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

He pushed until he found doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who felt they had a reasonable chance of success at treating his only daughter. They removed a portion of her right lung and then hammered her with radiation and chemotherapy.

It was much the same tack he had taken in 1973, when his elder son, Edward Jr., was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. He had to have his right leg amputated, but his father stayed by his bedside as he endured painful medication and therapy.

“As with Teddy, the family refused to accept this prognosis,’’ the senator wrote of Kara Kennedy in his memoir, “True Compass.” “We were told that every doctor we would consult would say the same thing, and I recall saying, ‘Fine. I just want to hear every one of them say it.’”

When, in May 2008, he was stricken with a malignant brain tumor, the senator drew strength for himself from the opportunity he created for his daughter.

As doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital doubted the value of operating on his own tumor, Kennedy wasn’t shy about leaving behind the world-renowned experts in his hometown for surgery at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

Edward M. and Kara Kennedy

A life expectancy that once spanned months eventually lasted for more than a year.

“Even this disease has proved itself an impetus for hope,” the senator wrote near his book’s conclusion. “In my lifetime, I have witnessed advances in medical understanding of malignancy and treatment for it that would have been unthinkable in my early years.”

Fellow Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, who served as junior senator under Kennedy for 24 years, said father and daughter shared a special bond, deepened by her cancer treatment and estrangement from her husband, Michael Allen.

“I think that he was particularly close to her in the last years, as her personal life changed and also as she went through this horrendous confrontation with her mortality. She was told it was terminal, inoperable, and Teddy wouldn’t accept that,” Kerry last night.

The senator spoke more frequently with Kara Kennedy this summer, as her daughter, Grace, who turns 17 today, worked for him as a Senate page. Kara Kennedy also had a 14-year-old son, Max.

In April, during brief remarks on Columbia Point at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Kara Kennedy paid tribute to her children.

She thanked them for attending the tribute to her father even though it meant two days out of class and “extra homework to prepare for on Monday,” she noted.

“She was full of energy. She had a great twinkle in her eye. But she was very, very shy in her own way,” Kerry said of Kara Kennedy.

The family said she was stricken with an apparent heart attack on Friday after taking a swim at a Washington health club.

Friends and relatives speculated the harsh medical treatment she had endured may have contributed to her death at a relatively young age - but still years beyond the diagnosis she once received and that her father refused to accept.

Paul Kirk Jr., who temporarily replaced Edward Kennedy in the Senate after cancer claimed him just over two years ago, said the bond endured.

“I believe Kara’s happiest moments were spent sailing ‘The Mya’ with her Dad and her own family across Nantucket Sound,” he said yesterday.