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Kennedy carried to Arlington, laid beside brothers
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-30 08:55

Kennedy carried to Arlington, laid beside brothers
Edward Kennedy Jr. (L), Vicki Reggie Kennedy and President Barack Obama attend funeral services for US Senator Edward Kennedy at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, Massachusetts August 29, 2009. [Agencis] 

In Boston, one son, Patrick, wept quietly as another, Teddy Jr., spoke from the pulpit of the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Teddy Jr. recalled the day years ago, shortly after losing a leg to cancer, that he slipped walking up an icy driveway as he headed out to go sledding. "I started to cry and I said, `I'll never be able to climb up that hill.'"

"And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget. He said, `I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can't do.'"

Rain beat down steadily as Kennedy's coffin was borne by a military honor guard into the Catholic church, and again when it was brought back out for the flight to Washington and the military cemetery just across the Potomac River from Washington.

In life, the senator had visited the burial ground often to mourn his brothers, killed in their 40s, more than a generation ago, by assassins' bullets.

"He was given a gift of time that his brothers were not. And he used that time to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," Obama said in a eulogy that also gently made mention of Kennedy's "personal failings and setbacks."