BOSTON, Mass. (AP) — Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained committed to social causes and the family legacy for decades afterward, died Thursday, her family said . . She was 96.

Kennedy had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke in her sleep on Oct. 3, her family said.

“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our wonderful grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III wrote on X. “She passed away this morning from complications related to a stroke she suffered last week.”

“In addition to a lifetime of work in social justice and human rights, our mother is survived by nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the family statement said.

The Kennedy matriarch, whose children included Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, was one of the last surviving members of a generation that also included President John F. Kennedy belonged. Her family said she had recently seen many of her relatives before she became ill.

Ethel Kennedy, the daughter of a millionaire who married the future senator and attorney general in 1950, had suffered more deaths by the age of 40, for all the world to see, than most people would in a lifetime.

She was at Robert F. Kennedy’s side when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after winning the Democratic presidential primaries in California. Her brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas less than five years earlier.

Her parents died in a plane crash in 1955, and her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David Kennedy later died of a drug overdose, son Michael Kennedy in a skiing accident, and nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash. Another cousin, Michael Skakel, was found guilty of murder in 2002, although a judge ordered a new trial in 2013 and the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2018.

In 2019, she mourned again after granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an apparent drug overdose.

“It makes you wonder how much this family is expected to have to absorb,” family friend Philip Johnson, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, told the Boston Herald after Michael Kennedy’s death.

Ethel Kennedy sustained herself through her faith and devotion to her family.

“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted knowing that she has been reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert. F Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saorise and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie. Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers,” the family statement said.

Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, initially worried about how she would deal with so much tragedy.

“I knew how difficult it would be for her to raise that large family without the leadership role and influence that Bobby would have provided,” Rose recalled in her memoir “Times to Remember.” “And of course she realized that, fully and sharply. Yet she did not give in.”

She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights shortly after her husband’s death, advocating for causes such as gun control and human rights. She rarely spoke about her husband’s murder. When her filmmaker daughter, Rory, brought this up in the 2012 HBO documentary “Ethel,” she couldn’t share her grief.

“When we lost daddy…” she began, before bursting into tears and asking her youngest daughter to “talk about something else.”

In 2008, she joined brother-in-law Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in supporting Senator Barack Obama for president, comparing him to her late husband. She made several trips to the White House during the Obama years, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 and met Pope Francis in 2015.

Many of her descendants became famous. Daughter Kathleen became lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress; Courtney married Paul Hill, who was wrongly convicted of an IRA bomb attack; Kerry became a human rights activist and chairman of the RFK Center; Christopher ran for governor of Illinois; Max served as a district attorney in Philadelphia and Douglas reported for Fox News Channel.

Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also became a national figure, although not ultimately as a liberal in the family tradition. First known as an environmental lawyer, he evolved into a conspiracy theorist who spread false theories about vaccines. He ran for president as an independent after briefly challenging President Joe Biden, and his name remained on ballots in multiple states after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.

Ethel Kennedy made no public comment on her son’s actions, although several other family members denounced him.

Decades earlier, she seemed to thrive on the increasing power of her in-laws. She was an enthusiastic supporter of JFK’s 1960 run and hosted some of the best-attended parties of the era at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, during the Kennedy administration, including one that hosted historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was pushed into prison fully clothed. swimming pool. In Kennedy’s mind, she was also known as an enthusiastic and highly competitive tennis player and a compulsive planner.

“Small and cheerful Ethel, who doesn’t look like an outdoors person at all, believes outdoor activities are so important for the children that she has arranged her busy cabinet lady schedule so that she can personally take them on two daily outings,” according to The Washington Post. reported in 1962.

In February of that year, she accompanied her husband on a goodwill tour around the world, stopping in Japan, Hong Kong, Italy and other countries. She said it was important for Americans to meet ordinary people abroad.

“People have a distinct fondness for Americans,” she told the Post. “But the communists have been so vocal that it was a surprise to some Asians to hear the American position. It’s good for Americans to travel and get our point across.”

Kennedy was born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of coal magnate George Skakel and Ann Brannack Skakel, a devout Roman Catholic. She grew up in a 31-room English country house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended Greenwich Academy before graduating from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx in 1945.

She met Robert Kennedy through his sister Jean, her roommate at Manhattanville College in New York. They moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he spent his final year studying law at the University of Virginia, and in 1957 they purchased Hickory Hill from John and Jacqueline Kennedy, who had purchased it in 1953.

Robert Kennedy became chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957. He was later appointed attorney general by his brother, the newly elected President Kennedy.

She had supported her husband in his successful 1964 campaign for the U.S. Senate in New York and his subsequent presidential bid. Pregnant with their eleventh child when he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, her look of shock and horror was captured by photographers in images that remained indelible decades later.

The murder traumatized the family, especially son David Kennedy, who watched the news in a hotel room. Just days shy of his 13th birthday, he never recovered, struggling with addiction problems for years and overdosing in 1984.

In 2021, she said that Sirhan Sirhan should not be released from prison, a view not shared by some others in her family. Two years later, a California panel denied him parole.

Although Ethel Kennedy was involved with several men after her husband’s death, most notably singer Andy Williams, she never remarried.

In April 2008, Ethel Kennedy visited Indianapolis on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A monument there commemorated King’s death and the speech her husband had given that evening in 1968, which was credited with preventing riots in the United States. city.

“Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would ultimately admire most,” Harry Belafonte would write about her. “She wasn’t acting. She looked at you and immediately understood what you were talking about. Over the next few years, when Bobby resisted something we wanted him to do for the movement, I often took my case to Ethel. “We need to talk to him,” she said, and she did.

Ethel Kennedy joined President Obama and former President Bill Clinton — each holding one of her hands — as they climbed the stairs to lay a wreath at President Kennedy’s grave during a November 2013 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death.

The nonprofit center she founded remains committed to advancing human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, and awards annual awards to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.

She was also active in the Coalition of Gun Control, Special Olympics and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher wages for Florida farmworkers and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Hickory Hill sold in 2009 for $8.25 million, and Ethel Kennedy split her time between homes in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida.