York Times proclaims when announcing the birth of Ethel and Bobby’s twenty-first grandchild on May 22.
Both Courtney Kennedy (the fifth of Ethel and Bobby’s brood, between brothers David and Michael) and her husband of four years, Paul Hill, are in their forties when their first and only child, Saoirse (pronounced “Searsha”) Roisin Hill, is born.
“I couldn’t understand a word he said,” Courtney recalls of first hearing Paul’s thick Belfast accent, “but I thought: ‘He’s gorgeous.’” They meet in 1990, when Courtney is recovering from a broken neck sustained in a skiing accident, and Paul—an Irishman known as one of “the Guildford Four”—is recently released from fifteen years in prison for an IRA bombing he didn’t commit, as dramatized in the Oscar-nominated 1993 movie In the Name of the Father. (Ironically, Courtney’s cousin Caroline Kennedy had once nearly been the victim of an IRA bombing herself. In October 1975, when she was seventeen and living in London, a bomb under the car Caroline was scheduled to take exploded prematurely, tragically killing a neighbor, a renowned cancer researcher.)
Courtney has a particular affinity for the Kennedys’ ancestral land, recalling the feeling of her first visit to Ireland as a teenager, “I felt like I was at home.” Her aunt Jean Kennedy Smith begins a five-year ambassadorship to Ireland in 1993, the year of Paul and Courtney’s marriage.
Reclusive Courtney, according to Vanity Fair, is “the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the [RFK] bunch.” She also grapples with lifelong depression, though she doesn’t blame it on the circumstances of her upbringing. “My difficulty was being able to say ‘I’m a Kennedy and I’m suffering from depression.’”
That she and Paul name their daughter Saoirse—which means “Freedom” in Gaelic—is profound, but Courtney wavers on passing along the Kennedy. “I just thought it would be one name too many,” she explains. Though at first the sole Kennedy grandchild not to use the name, in later years Courtney’s daughter seems happy to claim it, signing her name “Saoirse Kennedy-Hill.”
In 2002, Courtney and Paul decide to move their family to Ireland, where they can bring their daughter up in a “less manic” environment. “Being here,” Courtney notes, “is the best medication I can think of,” for her lingering depression. And Saoirse, both her parents say, is “very Irish.” The marriage doesn’t last, however, and when the couple separates in 2006, Courtney and Saoirse, then eight years old, move back to the United States.
Courtney’s cousin Timothy Shriver calls his niece “an only child with a hundred brothers and sisters,” and her uncle Bobby Jr. agrees, saying, “She became a sister or daughter to a hundred Kennedys, Shrivers, and Lawfords. We all considered her our own.”
Bobby Jr. affectionately calls her “an outgoing imp with a rebellious nature, an irreverence towards authority and deep commitment to mischief,” attributes he says are likely inherited from her parents—Courtney and Paul.
Nevertheless, like her mother, Saoirse suffers from depression. At age eighteen, she bravely writes a personal essay in Deerfield Academy’s paper, the Deerfield Scroll. “Although I was mostly a happy child, I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest,” Saoirse explains, urging her high school classmates and community to be more compassionate. “We are all either struggling or know someone who is battling an illness; let’s come together to make our community more inclusive and comfortable.”
Saoirse also helps found Deerfield Students Against Sexual Assault, motivated by her own experience. “I did the worst thing a victim can do,” she reveals, “and I pretended it hadn’t happened. This all became too much, and I attempted to take my own life.”
She graduates in 2016, moving on to Boston College as a communications major and vice president of the College Democrats. Bill Stone, a fellow BC student, describes Saoirse as “very kind, funny, bright, smart,” but adds, “I knew she had her demons.”
She also possesses great empathy. In 2014, on the thirtieth anniversary of her uncle David’s death more than a decade before she was born, she addresses David online: “You were a kind, gentle spirit that went through unimaginable struggles in your life,” she writes. “It saddens me to know that we will never meet in this world, but I know I will see you up in heaven with my grandfather, Uncle Michael, and other family members.”
Her words come true far sooner than anyone could have expected.
Twenty-two-year-old Saoirse spends the night of July 31, 2019, in Hyannis Port—finishing up some schoolwork and watching the Democratic presidential debates with her ninety-one-year-old