If there’s any family that epitomizes the saying “money can’t buy you happiness,” it’s the Kennedys. They’ve had privilege, to be sure, but it’s come at an awfully steep price. The patriarch, Joe Sr., lived long enough to see three of his four sons struck down in the prime of life while he was debilitated by a stroke. Joe Jr. died a war hero in 1944, leaving Jack Kennedy to inherit the mantle of “future president.” When he was gunned down in 1963, his brother Robert went from serving as JFK’s hatchet man and attorney general to being lost, and he would find himself as a champion of the poor and oppressed. When he too was struck by an assassin’s bullet in 1968, Teddy got the burden of being the last one left, and he never quite lived up to that role.

Of course, if there’s anything we’ve learned as a society over the years, it’s that we as a nation have a love/hate relationship with the rich and powerful. The Kennedys in some ways embody the best and worst of what we want our public figures to be, elevated to leadership and public service while wallowing in private excesses and caught in horrendous scandals. If there’s such a thing as a “Kennedy Curse,” it has almost certainly exacted a heavy toll this year (with Ted’s sister Eunice dying earlier this summer).

What makes the Kennedys so relatable, however, is that for all the money and fame and special privileges their name can buy, they’re very much like any family in the country. The Kennedys are cursed to play out their highs and lows on a public stage (just witness the funeral service of Teddy, carried on all major networks this very morning and into the afternoon), and it is in their triumphs and tragedies that we can recognize a little of what we ourselves go through, without the glare of media spotlights brought to bear on our worst moments as well as our bests.

If I’m being a little too poetic in my renderings of Edward Kennedy and his family for my more conservative neighbors, too bad; the man was certainly fallible, but he was after all just a man, a mortal like you and me, subject to bad decisions but also capable of good intentions. The far right vilified him because, quite frankly, he didn’t have the decency to die early like his brothers, but continued to exert his influence upon the public stage long after the gunshots of Dallas and the Ambassador Hotel stopped ringing in our ears. They jumped for joy when he staggered drunkenly and made a fool of himself, and they seethed when he bested them in debate or legislation. He might not have been presidential material, but he was certainly a worthy opponent to those who faced him across the aisle (many of whom paid their respects at his funeral, suggesting a tenuous link with a less partisan and rancorous past, one which we raised in the post-Watergate or Iran Contra era might never know). He was not always right, but he was almost always giving his all for that which he believed in. You can’t say that about many of the leading lights on either side of the political divide today.

For a man born to wealth, Ted could’ve taken the position of an aristocrat, deigning to acknowledge those below him in status only when it served him. But stories over the past week attest that he could call even the poorest among his constituents “friend” and honestly mean it.

I apologize if I’ve managed to ruffle the feathers of those who make a living on hating the Kennedys and what they stood for, or those who choose to highlight only the times when Ted fell and not the times when he rose from the mat to try one more round. I know it’s not fashionable around here to regard the Kennedys as anything other than do-gooder liberals who interfered with whatever system of inequality we had down here to keep blacks in line, because God forbid we should throw away the past like a disused piece of toilet paper and look to a better future. I wrote last time about how weird it was for me to suddenly be in the position of defending a president instead of attacking him, and I feel that way about Ted and his extended family.

Maybe it’s part of my contrarian nature to resist the eulogizing of the Lost Cause and prefer instead to mourn another time during which I was not alive, when Camelot seemed an illusionary reality brought down by the violence of our thoroughly confused nation. Whatever it is, it’s not that I want to be a Kennedy, but that I feel like the Kennedys would want to be one of us, just a normal family. That they cannot is a shame, but that they try to use that status for something other than themselves (when they have used it, to be fair; there are plenty of Kennedy kids with questionable behaviors that sully the family name) is admirable. Maybe none of us can be a Kennedy, but we can be helpful to those around us. In the end, that’s the Kennedy legacy I’d like to see flourish.