Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the 22-year-old granddaughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, will be laid to rest on Monday at a funeral Mass in Cape Cod. She died on Thursday, the Kennedy family stated.
Hill’s funeral will be held at 11 a.m. at the Our Lady of Victory Church in the Barnstable, Massachusetts village of Centerville, according to the Boston Globe and CBS Boston.
The Kennedy family has frequented Our Lady of Victory for decades. Former President John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline Kennedy married her husband Edwin Schlossberg at the church in 1986, which has also hosted funerals and wakes for multiple Kennedys, including Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s wake in 2009 and Michael Kennedy’s funeral in 1998.
District Attorney Michael O’Keefe for Massachusetts’ Cape & Islands District confirmed her death in a statement to USA TODAY, saying police responded at 3 p.m. on Thursday to a call about “an unresponsive female, later identified as Saoirse Kennedy Hill.”
“Hill was transported to Cape Cod Hospital where she was pronounced deceased,” the statement reads. “The cause and manner of death are pending the toxicology report.”
Hill was the only child of Courtney Kennedy Hill, the fifth of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s eleven children.
The Kennedy family also confirmed her death in a statement to the Associated Press, saying, “Our hearts are shattered by the loss of our beloved Saoirse.”
“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the statement said. “We will love her and miss her forever.”
Robert’s widow Ethel, 91, said the “world is a little less beautiful today” following her granddaughter’s sudden death.
Related: Kennedy family mourns Saoirse Kennedy Hill: ‘Our hearts are shattered’
The Kennedy curse: With Saoirse’s death, a look at who else tragically died in this prominent family
Speaking to NBC Nightly News on Friday, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy called Hill, his cousin’s daughter, “a real hero” in the Kennedy family.
He spoke about how Hill bravely shared her mental health struggles in her high school newspaper three years ago, and praised her for “(opening) the door for her peers to also come out and not feel shamed by this illness.”
“We mourn her loss but her memory will live on as someone who wasn’t going to keep silent and wasn’t going to be feeling as if she had something shameful but rather something medical that she sought treatment for,” he said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mourned his niece on Friday, writing on Instagram, “We’ve lost our daughter and our children, their sister. Saoirse was fierce, both in her love for her family and yearning for justice. A fearless adventurer, she inspired curiosity and daring in her friends. But her greatest gift was to find humor in everything and to give us all the gift of her laughter – and our own. The gaping hole that she leaves in our family is a wound too large to ever heal.”
Saoirse’s death is the latest example of the compendium of tragedies referred to as the “Kennedy curse,” which also includes the assassination of former President Kennedy in 1963 and Hill’s grandfather, “Bobby” Kennedy, in 1968.
Last month also marked the 50th anniversary of the Chappaquiddick incident, in which then-Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Martha’s Vineyard, the accident killing 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.
USA TODAY has reached out to the family for further information.
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