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Ethel Kennedy, the widow of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a longtime human rights activist, died Thursday, her family said. She was 96.

Former Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy III announced the news of his grandmother’s death from X. Ethel Kennedy was hospitalized last week after suffering a stroke.

“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-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the former congressman wrote in a post . “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 Saoirse; and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie.”

Kennedy married into one of the United States’ most influential political families and supported her husband during his successful Senate campaign and later during his 1968 presidential run, which ended with his assassination months into the campaign.

Her husband was tragically shot in a Los Angeles hotel shortly after winning California’s Democratic primary. The attack, which came five years after Robert F. Kennedy’s brother, former President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed, left five others injured and roiled a nation already shaken by multiple assassinations; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered about two months earlier. Photos from the aftermath of the shooting show Ethel Kennedy leaning over her husband with her hands over his chest as he bled on the ground. At the time, she was three months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Rory.

In the decades following her husband’s death, Ethel Kennedy emerged as an environmental and human rights activist in her own right, founding the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights to advocate for the causes her late husband pushed.

Her activism took her across the country and around the world, from marching with Cesar Chavez in support of the Farm Workers movement to confronting Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi with her daughter Kerry by her side in 1989. She received the country’s highest civilian honor. , the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Barack Obama in 2014. Her activism continued well into the last decades of her life. In 2018, Kennedy joined a hunger strike to protest the then-Trump administration’s separation of families at the US-Mexico border.

“Generations of Americans have not toiled and sacrificed to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she said in a statement at the time.

Most recently, Ethel Kennedy’s family became embroiled in political conflict when her eldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran for president in 2024, initially as a Democrat and later as an independent. Members of the loyal Democratic family shunned his campaign, calling it “dangerous” and noting their frustration and sadness. RFK Jr. suspended his campaign in August and endorsed former President Donald Trump.

Ethel Kennedy was born in 1928 into a large family in Chicago and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She met Robert F. Kennedy in 1945 through his sister, Jean Kennedy, during a ski trip. The couple married in 1950 and had 11 children.

Ethel Kennedy’s life, like that of many of her family members, was marked by a series of tragedies. Her father, George Skakel, a wealthy coal magnate, and mother, Ann Skakel, died in a plane crash in 1955. Her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David died in 1984 of an accidental drug overdose. son Michael died in a skiing accident in 1997. Her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an accidental overdose in 2019, and another granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, drowned with her 8-year-old son in a canoeing accident in 2020.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Paul LeBlanc and Tom Foreman contributed to this report.