15 Weird Facts About the Losses That Changed Jackie Kennedy Most Deeply

She lost more than anyone should be required to lose. And she was changed by every single one of them.
The losses of Jacqueline Kennedy's life were not the ordinary losses of an ordinary life — the gradual and expected losses of age and time that every human existence accumulates across the decades. They were the specific and extraordinary losses of a life that had been placed, by the specific accident of who she was and who she had married, at the intersection of the most significant events of the American century.
She had lost children before they could be born. She had lost the father who had been the most important person in her formation. She had lost her husband to an assassin's bullet in a Texas motorcade. She had lost the brother-in-law who had been her most essential support in the rebuilding. She had lost the second husband to illness. She had lost the friends who had sustained her across the decades.
Each loss had changed her. Not in the dramatic and visible way of the person who collapses under the weight of what has been taken. In the specific and permanent way of the person who is altered by what they have carried — whose character and whose understanding of the world and whose relationship with the daily life are permanently and specifically shaped by the accumulated experience of the most extreme human losses.
She had been changed by every loss she carried. Some of the changes had been devastating. Some had been, in the specific and paradoxical way of the great losses, the making of the most essential dimensions of who she became.
Here are fifteen of the most significant losses that changed Jackie Kennedy most deeply — and what the changing had produced.