Arshad Mahmud, from Washington
Washington, aug 30 (bdnews24.com)--She was largely unnoticed during the memorial service of Senator Edward Kennedy at the weekend.
While the spotlight was on Victoria Kennedy, the senator's second wife, the obvious question many asked: where was Joan Kennedy, his first wife and mother of his three children?
According to her sister Candace McMurrey, Joan attended the Thursday mass in the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, near Boston. She tried "not to intrude" yet to honor the life of her ex-husband.
"She feels it's very nice to be included in the final saying goodbye to him and she appreciates being included in that, because she was married to him for 25 years," McMurrey told ABCNews.com.
Joan Kennedy preferred to remain aloof and outside the limelight, especially after she was found lying bleeding on a sidewalk in Boston in 2005 caused by an alcohol overdose. But she reportedly rented a house close to the Kennedy's apparently seeking proximity to her ex-husband after he was diagnosed with brain cancer last year.
According to family friends, they remained friends, although they were divorced years ago. "They had an ongoing friendship," said a family member.
"There are all sort of emotions."
After the 2005 incident, Joan Kennedy's children intervened in her affairs, obtaining a court-ordered guardianship that put Ted Kennedy, Jr. in charge of his mother's care.
Her alcohol addiction is widely blamed for the couple's divorce. But according to the 1994 book, "The Kennedy Women: "The Saga of an American Family", which sold out early in the week after the senator's death, she was not wholly responsible.
Laurence Leamer, the book's author, told ABCNews.com, "She blames her alcoholism on the Kennedys and says Chappaquiddick put her over the top". Still, Leamer said she was already a problem.
Joan Kennedy first lost her driver's license for six months after a drunk-driving arrest in Virginia in 1974. Three more arrests and frequent hospitalizations would follow.
Edward Moore Kennedy and Virginia Joan Bennett met in 1957 when she was attending Manhattanville College in New York, not far from the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where she grew up.
A concert-quality piano player and part-time model, Joan Kennedy met her future husband through his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, who also attended the college, along with Ethel Skakel, the future Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy. The couple married in 1958.
The couple had three children: Kara, 49, who successfully battled lung cancer in 2003; Edward Jr., 47, who lost a leg to bone cancer when he was 12; and Patrick, 42, currently a Rhode Island congressman. The youngest was arrested in a 2006 car accident and voluntarily went into rehab for abuse of sleeping pills.
After the Chappaquidick tragedy in 1969, when Ted Kennedy admitted responsibility for the drowning death of 27-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne in a fatal car crash on Martha's Vineyard, his wife stood at his side.
She accompanied her husband to Kopechne's Pennsylvania funeral and claimed it caused her to miscarry a month later. She had earlier lost two other children, one a stillborn.
"For a few months everyone had to put on this show, and then I just didn't care anymore," she told Leamer. "I just saw no future. That's when I truly became an alcoholic."
When Kennedy ran for president in 1980, his wife campaigned for him, even though the couple had been living apart for two years.
In 1982, they divorced at her request, according to Edward Klein, author of "Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died.
"It was "a real effort on her part to establish herself as an independent woman who would no longer be an extension of Ted's life. She tried very, very hard," he told USA Today.
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