Excerpt: 'What Remains'

Oct. 4, 2005 — -- In the summer of 1999, Carole Radziwill was mentally preparing for the death of her husband; but there was more pain to come.

On July 16, 1999, Radziwill's best friends -- John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette -- died in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. Three weeks later, her husband and John F. Kennedy Jr.'s cousin, Anthony Radziwill, lost his battle with cancer.

"Once it was the four of us, with all of our dreams and plans, and then suddenly there was nothing," Radziwill writes in her new memoir, "What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love."

Radziwill, whose family once lived on food stamps, was working as an ABC News producer in the early 1990s when she met and fell in love with Anthony Radziwill. They were married in 1994, just after her husband was diagnosed with cancer.

"You convince yourself it's going to be OK, and I think I did that," Radziwill told "Good Morning America." "We didn't go into this marriage thinking it was the end. We thought of it as a beginning."

As she entered the world of American royalty, Radziwill bonded with Bessette, in part because they both felt like outsiders among the Kennedys.

"Without a doubt. I think she recognized it in me immediately and I recognized it in her," Radziwill told ABC.

The Radziwills were spending the summer of 1999 at Kennedy and Bessette's house on the Vineyard as Anthony's health declined. Radziwill was the first person to receive the call that Kennedy's plane was missing in the early hours of July 16.

"If you get a call past midnight, it's never good news," Radziwill said. "I knew right away it wasn't going to end well."

Radziwill said she suffered from survivor's guilt for a long time after the death of her husband and best friends.

"In the chaos of the aftermath of that summer I took on the responsibility of keeping them all alive in my mind," Radziwill said.

Radziwell gives new life to her famously private family in "What Remains." You can read an excerpt from the book below.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Friday, July 16, 1999

Three weeks before my husband died a young couple smashed their plane into the Atlantic Ocean, off the Massachusetts shoreline, well after the mid-July sun had set. It was reported in the news as 9:41, but I knew the general time, because I had spoken to the woman less than an hour before. The pilot was my husband's cousin, John Kennedy. His wife, Carolyn Bessette, was my closest friend. She was sitting behind him next to the only other passenger, her sister, Lauren. A still, hot summer day had melted into a warm and sticky night. A quiet night, unremarkable except for the fog, which rolls in and out of New England like a deep sigh.

While we were still making plans, before they took off from Caldwell, New Jersey, she called me from the plane.

"We'll fly to the Vineyard tomorrow, after the wedding. We can be there before dinner."

It was a short conversation, because I was going to see her the next day. I was staying in her house, their house, on Martha's Vineyard, with my husband, and they were taking a simple trip. One they'd made many other weekends, from a small airport in New Jersey to the islands off Massachusetts -- a well-worn ninety-minute path up the coastline.

I hung up the phone and opened the book I was reading and an hour later she was dead. Afterward I tried to find something to explain what had happened -- was it cloudy, were the stars out? But the night was ordinary. It usually is, I think, when your life changes. Most people aren't doing anything special when the carefully placed pieces of their life break apart.

They flew a lot that summer, from the city to the Vineyard, and we called each other every day if we weren't together.

"We're getting a late start. I'll call you in the morning."

It takes seconds to plunge into an irrevocable spin in a small plane -- into what the Federal Aviation Administration calls a graveyard spiral. According to the accident report, the plane broke the surface of the ocean three minutes after the pilot sensed a problem. At 9:38, he made a curious turn. One hundred and eighty seconds later, the last thirty of them aimed directly at the water, their stories ended abruptly.

I wonder if he felt the awkward motions of the plane in those minutes, the changes in speed or direction. It's likely he did not. If you close your eyes in an airplane, you don't feel up or down. You don't feel yourself tilting right or left. You don't feel anything, really, and your senses tell you it doesn't matter. Clouds were hiding the familiar strings of lights that paint the coastline. He might as well have been flying with his eyes closed.

"I need to talk to you," I said.

My husband, Anthony, was dying and we were all trying to pretend that he wasn't, that everything was fine.

"I can't hear you, Lamb. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"