Family, leaders pay final tribute to Kennedy

updated 8:28 p.m. ET Aug. 29, 2009

WASHINGTON - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest alongside slain brothers John and Robert on hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday evening, celebrated for "the dream he kept alive" across the decades since their deaths.

Crowds lined the streets of two cities on a day that marked the end of a political era — outside Kennedy's funeral in rainy Boston, and later in the day in humid, late-summer Washington. With flags over the Capitol flying at half-staff in his memory, his hearse stopped outside the Senate where he served for 47 years.

"Go now, to your place of rest. And meet the Lord, your God," said the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, the House chaplain.

A few miles away, Kennedy's freshly excavated gravesite was on a gently sloping Virginia hillside, flanked by a pair of maple trees. His brother Robert, killed in 1968 while running for president, lies 100 feet away. It is another 100 to the eternal flame that has burned since 1963 for John F. Kennedy, president when he was assassinated.

Kennedy died Tuesday at 77, more than a year after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

One son, Patrick, wept quietly as another son, Teddy Jr., spoke from the pulpit of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. Teddy Jr. recalled the day years ago, shortly after losing a leg to cancer, that he slipped walking up an icy driveway as he headed out to go sledding. "I started to cry and I said, `I'll never be able to climb up that hill,'" the son said.

"And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget. He said, `I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can't do.'"

Rain beat down steadily as Kennedy's coffin was borne by a military honor guard into the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and again when it was brought back out for the flight to Washington and the military cemetery in Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Video   Obama: Kennedy was the ‘greatest legislator of our time’ Aug. 29: In a eulogy to Ted Kennedy, the president remembers Kennedy as one who used his hardship to become more sensitive to the plights of others. NBC News

In life, the senator had visited the burial ground often to mourn his brothers, John and Robert, killed in their 40s, more than a generation ago, by assassins' bullets.

"He was given a gift of time that his brothers were not. And he used that time to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," Obama said in a eulogy that also gently made mention of Kennedy's "personal failings and setbacks."

As a member of the Senate, Kennedy was a "veritable force of nature," the president said. But more than that, the "baby of the family who became its patriarch, the restless dreamer who became its rock."

Those left behind to mourn "grieve his passing with the memories he gave, the good he did, the dream he kept alive" Obama said inside the packed church.

Hundreds lined nearby sidewalks, ignoring the rain, as the funeral procession passed.

"I said to myself this morning, 'No matter what the weather, I'm going, I don't care if I have to swim," said Lillian Bennett, 59, who added she was a longtime Kennedy supporter and determined to get as close as she could to the invitation-only funeral.

"The Mass of Christian burial weaves together memory and hope," said the Rev. Mark R. Hession, parish priest at the church in a working class neighborhood of Boston.

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