Pilgrimage to Hyannis, Day Five: Farewell and Departure

In the evening after dinner, I packed my belongings so that I would not have to rush in the morning. I wanted my final hours in Hyannis to feel deliberate, not hurried. As I packed, I watched PBS and saw a short promotional segment about KISSINGER, an upcoming American Experience documentary.

The image of Kissinger immediately brought to mind a photo I had once seen in Patrick J. Kennedy's memoir A Common Struggle: a very young Patrick kneeling beside Dr. Kissinger, also kneeling, proudly showing him a small aquarium in his childhood bedroom. 

It reminded me that although I came to Hyannis for the Kennedys, my interest in history is not limited to a single family but to the currents of leadership, consequence, and human complexity that shape public life.

I slept lightly and woke around 4:30 in the morning, then drifted back to sleep. I had planned to walk before sunrise to the JFK Memorial at Lewis Bay to watch the first light over the water, hoping to later watch the sunset at the JFK Memorial in Cambridge once I returned home, a sunrise and sunset, two bookends to a pilgrimage. But when I opened the balcony door, the cold air rushed in. I had only a thin hoodie and had only just recovered from sinus trouble two days earlier. I chose, reluctantly, to remain inside.

At 9:00 I woke again and went downstairs for breakfast one final time, which I carried back to my room while listening to the morning news. Since I had already packed, it took only a few minutes to make sure nothing was left behind.

At 10:22 I checked out of the hotel, taking one last quiet look at the room that had sheltered me for four nights.

I still had time before my departure, so I walked to the Hyannis Public Library for a final visit. 

I do not fully understand why I felt so drawn to that small building, but it had become a sanctuary to me, not a tourist destination, but a place of warmth, stillness, and thought.

Returning to it four times in four days revealed something I had not consciously named. I did not go there for research or shelter or scenery. I went because it felt like a place where I belonged. It was not history behind glass like the museum, nor legacy preserved in stone like the memorials. It was something quieter, a living space of thought rather than tribute, of presence rather than memory. I realized, sitting there for the last time, that I was not only visiting Hyannis. I was rehearsing what it might feel like to live here, to have a corner of the world where I could enter, sit down, and not feel like a guest but someone slowly learning how to arrive. 

I sat for about fifteen minutes, absorbing the familiar hush, as if saying a small goodbye.

When I left, I briefly walked to see the nearby campus of Cape Cod Community College in Hyannis since I have been contemplating an eventual return to school. 

I learned that it mainly houses the ACCCESS program and that the main campus is nearly four miles away in Barnstable. It left me wondering what attending classes there would look like in practical terms, whether this place that felt spiritually familiar could one day also become educationally real.

With limited time remaining, I considered walking the Kennedy Legacy Trail again but decided against risking the distance. Instead, I returned to the first landmark I had visited on my arrival, the bronze statue of President Kennedy in front of the JFK Hyannis Museum. 

Four days ago, it was a welcome. Today it was a farewell. I stood before him for several minutes. The figure is sculpted barefoot, moving forward as if toward the sea. I did not speak aloud, but my thoughts were their own prayer of gratitude and hope. This would be the final image of Hyannis before I left.

Soon I walked the short distance to the Hyannis Transportation Center and arrived early for my bus. As it pulled away, I saw a Cape Cod Central Railroad train departing at the same time, two journeys leaving from the same point. I wondered where its passengers were headed and what new stories they were beginning.

During the ride back to Boston I sat quietly with my thoughts. 

I wondered what these four days would become in me over time. Whether I might return one day not as a visitor but as a neighbor. Whether this was the end of something or the beginning of something. Or both.

My bus arrived at South Station at 1:35 in the afternoon. 

Instead of going home, I made an unplanned decision. I took my luggage and went directly to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 

I knew it would be closed due to the government shutdown, but I needed to stand there anyway, because that building is the other doorway through which this journey began, years earlier, when I met Jean Kennedy Smith.

The pilgrimage did not begin in Hyannis. It began the day I met her. That moment created the interior movement which led me here. She was the last living link to both Jack and Bobby and when she stood before me, she represented not history on display but history still breathing. I did not fully understand it at the time, but something sacred had begun. Returning to the library now was not repetition. It was return. The journey could not conclude on the Cape itself. It had to come back to the point of first stirrings, the quiet place where longing turned into pilgrimage.

Unable to enter the building, I walked down to the Harbor Walk behind it.

There, to my astonishment, Victura was still on display, facing outward toward the ocean as if ready to sail.

I had seen it before, but until this pilgrimage I had never fully understood how much of his identity was formed not in marble or monuments but in motion, in steering forward.

In Hyannis I walked the ground where he lived. Here I stood before a vessel that carried what grounded him. The boat was not memory. It was direction.

The boat pointed outward toward the open water, not anchored, not still. The inscription at Lewis Bay echoed in my mind, and I realized his words were the truest ending this pilgrimage could have. Not my own reflection, but his:

I believe that it is important that this country sail and not lie still in the harbors. Great opportunities lie before us, and great responsibilities have been placed upon us. I believe we can meet them. We have in the past, we are going to today, and I know we will in the future.
— John F. Kennedy, Address to the Nation on the State of the US Economy, August 13, 1962

Pilgrimage to Hyannis, Day Four: Sanctuary and the JFK Hyannis Museum

I woke up at 9:30 in the morning and slept moderately well. This would be my last full day in Hyannis before departing tomorrow. After having breakfast on time in my room, I went out into the late morning air. The forecast had warned of thunderstorms, but the storms never came. The sky shifted gently throughout the day, sometimes clouded and sometimes bright, as if the weather itself were reluctant to disturb the quiet.

Since I had already travelled by foot and by bus over long distances for the past two days, I chose to remain within walking distance of my hotel for this final day. I decided to walk the Kennedy Legacy Trail once more before visiting the JFK Hyannis Museum.

Along the route I remembered that I had not yet gone inside St. Francis Xavier Church. 

This time I stepped through its doors. As I entered, an instrumental version of “God Help the Outcasts” rose in my mind again like a whispered prayer. 

The sanctuary was lined with sculpted reliefs of the Stations of the Cross, echoing the ones I had seen at Our Lady of Victory Parish in Centerville.

This parish holds the altar dedicated to Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. 

Church historians recall that President Kennedy sat in the second pew on the east side, with Secret Service agents in the rows before and behind him. 

Patrick Kennedy was baptized here. Maria Shriver was married here. 

The funeral mass for Eunice Kennedy Shriver was held here in 2009.

The sanctuary was empty when I entered, and I was able to locate the pew where President Kennedy would have sat. 

I sat down in silence. This was not a moment of historical reenactment. I simply sat there and let the stillness speak. 

For the first time I found myself thinking of him not as a statesman, but as another soul seeking strength. I do not know what he thought as he sat in that pew, but I was struck by the fact that before he was a president, he was a parishioner. A man among worshippers, looking toward God as any other man would.

When parishioners slowly began to enter, I rose and continued the Legacy Trail for a final time, eventually arriving again at the John F. Kennedy Memorial. 

The rough fieldstone walls seemed even more fortress like than before, like something carved out of time rather than built upon it. I sat on one of the stone benches and remained there for a while, simply watching the quiet of the water and the dimming light. I did not go down to the shoreline this time. I stayed still.

From the memorial I made my way back toward Main Street. Before entering the museum, I carried with me something I had learned the previous day while reading White House by the Sea about how the museum came to be. In the early nineties the Hyannis Chamber of Commerce received constant calls from visitors who asked how to get to the Kennedy Compound. The homes were private, and there was no tour to offer. There was a memorial, but as the book noted, there was not really anything to learn there, only a fountain to toss a coin into. The solution became a museum, but Jackie had one requirement: it must be housed in a building that existed when Jack was alive so that the memories would be rooted in place, not presentation. Only then did the family give its blessing. Knowing this, I understood the museum differently, almost as a threshold where public memory meets the edges of private belonging.

By the time I reached Main Street again, the day no longer felt like a final stop on a trip. It felt like a threshold. 

I entered the museum at 1:43 in the afternoon. It felt like continuing the same stillness already begun in the church.

The first gallery began not with the presidency but with family. A large photograph of Jack and Jackie holding Caroline filled the opening wall. 

The exhibit did not introduce him through achievement, but through belonging. 

Just a few steps further, another family portrait appeared. This one from long before the presidency, before campaigns and motorcades, when the Kennedys were simply a string of children gathered around their parents at the shore. 

The wall text beside it, titled “The Early Years,” described how Joseph and Rose first came to Hyannis Port in the 1920s and how the summers there shaped the rhythm of their family life: sailing, swimming, sand underfoot, siblings tumbling in and out of each other’s laughter. Seeing them all together in this image set the tone for the gallery

A display nearby traced the shoreline and the compound grounds, showing how place itself shaped identity. 

Only then did the timeline lift outward into 1960, showing crowds gathered near the fence on election night, waiting for the results.

The next room was quieter, almost chapel like in its simplicity. 

White benches faced a screen showing old footage of the President sailing, narrated by Walter Cronkite.

The blinds were drawn, softening the light until the room felt hushed, like a return to stillness after the swell of the campaign. Here the story slowed.

Cronkite’s narration described how Hyannis Port restored him, how he came back to the sea not as escape but as renewal. It was easy to imagine him stepping briefly out of the public world into salt air and family light, where he could be simply Jack again.

From there the exhibition opened into Presidential Summers, filled with images of cousins racing across lawns and piling onto golf carts, and afternoons on the Victura. The presidency here did not separate him from family. It returned him to them.

Just beyond was a quieter gallery devoted to the Victura itself. 

The model was displayed as though still touched by the salt air. 

This was not framed as hobby but formation. The sea was where he learned to endure, to read shifts of wind, to trust instinct and restraint. His doodles of the boat were displayed beside it, unguarded and personal, traces of a man most at home in motion across open water. 

The boat’s Latin name, meaning she who is victorious, was not presented as prophecy but as the quiet shaping of a life long before history arrived to claim it. The Victura was not a symbol of escape. It was return.

The next room turned toward Jackie. 

The gallery warmed in color and tone, shifting into the domestic and artistic world she built around their family. Here she was not ornament beside a leader, but the interior stillness that made the outer life livable. Photographs showed her painting at the Cape and reading with her children before the world ever labeled her an icon.

The path through the museum then circled back into his early life, his studies, and his travels.

 These were not framed as precursors to power, but as the shaping of character beneath it.

His first run for Congress in 1946 was shown less as ambition and more as inheritance after the loss of his brother. Nearby was a photograph of the family standing outside St. Francis Xavier Church, the very parish I had visited earlier that morning. 

The panel explained that when news of Joe Jr.’s death reached Hyannis Port in 1944, they came to this church seeking solace, and the family later dedicated the main altar in his memory.

The text noted that after Joe Jr.’s death, Jack became the family’s standard bearer, responsible for the hopes and unfinished intentions of the brother who could not return.

The presidency section followed, grounded in nearness. 

A video played of the Inaugural address, but the photographs surrounding it showed not motorcades or statecraft, but evenings by the sea and barefoot steps across Cape grass. 

One quote from Jackie read, “It was really the happiest time of my life. It was when we were the closest... I did not realize the physical closeness of having his office in the same building and seeing him so many times a day.”

As the story arrived at 1963, it appeared not as closure, but as a legacy that still inspires. 

Nearby stood a small statue concept of Jack walking beside his young son, a life paused in motion, inscribed only with the words what could have been.

After the unfinished path, the gallery opened into the life of the brother who stepped forward to carry what could not continue. The exhibit was titled RFK: Ripple of Hope, which widened into the story of Robert F. Kennedy. 

His gallery did not move with lineage but with conscience.

Photographs of his brother as companion gradually gave way to the weight he chose to carry forward, not as heir to a mantle, but as answer to suffering. There was a tenderness in those images, a man carrying sorrow not just for himself, but for others.

There was also a short film playing on loop and former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III appeared on the screen speaking about the legacy of his grandfather. 

When I saw Joseph III on the screen, I remembered meeting him at the JFK Library years ago.

Upstairs was a special exhibit titled “We Remember John F. Kennedy Jr.” 

As soon as the elevator doors opened, I was met by a life-sized bronze statue of John F. Kennedy Jr., saluting as a child of three, forever mid-gesture. I was not expecting it. Its smallness, its human scale, caught me by quiet surprise. 

The panels that followed returned him first to childhood, lifted into his father’s arms on the tarmac, small against a window before the world learned his name. 

Some I had seen before. Others were unfamiliar and disarmingly tender. 

It felt less like an exhibit and more like a window into a life that had been fully human before it was ever iconic. His adulthood appeared not through office but through voice, the founding of George as authorship rather than imitation. 

Next to it hung the photograph of his wedding, joy without foreshadow, a moment permitted to stand without the weight of what would come after.

The final artifact was the smallest pair of shoes, worn in summers when the future was still unbroken.

The exhibit did not tell the story of an ending. It left open the longing of a life still becoming. I want to close this entry with the voice of the one who loved him most in public life, his uncle Ted Kennedy, delivered on July 23, 1999, in his eulogy. His words captured both the loss and the lingering light of who John was becoming.

"He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will love forever in our memory, and in our beguiled and broken hearts.

We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.

We who have loved him from the day he was born, and watched the remarkable man he became, now bid him farewell.

God bless you, John and Carolyn. We love you and we always will."