At Mary Kennedy's Funeral, Mourners Remember Her Generosity Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at rear, and other pallbearers with the coffin of Mary Kennedy on Saturday at St. Patrick's Church in Bedford, N.Y. Many friends from the entertainment field attended. BEDFORD, N.Y. - In a service that mixed pain, tribute and wry humor, family and friends said farewell on Saturday morning to Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ms. Kennedy, 52, who hanged herself in a barn at her home here on Wednesday, was remembered as a woman with almost boundless gifts - for friendship, language, parenting, raising money for worthy causes and nurturing friends and family. And she was remembered as a woman who, for the past five years in particular, struggled with depression and substance abuse until the end, when she could struggle no more. The funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church, a prim stone building on the town green of this northern Westchester County community with the whitewashed homes, stone walls and air of the New England towns that Ms. Kennedy loved, brought out many members of the Kennedy family, including her mother-in-law, Ethel Kennedy, and Maria Shriver. It also brought out many friends from public life and entertainment, including Larry David, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Glenn Close and Chevy Chase. Amid the circumstances of Ms. Kennedy's death and its aftermath, in which Mr. Kennedy and members of her family fought in court over control of her remains, the service was focused on the life she lived and the lives she touched. Mr. Kennedy's sister Kerry Kennedy, who was Mary's high school and college roommate before she became her sister-in-law, recalled a rafting trip to Colombia in 1977, during which everyone's clothes were drenched except for Ms. Kennedy's, because she was the only one with the wherewithal to protect hers in plastic. Kerry Kennedy said Mary Kenney then shared her dry clothes with everyone else, while wearing the wet ones herself. "She didn't care about herself," she said. She cared about everybody else, and she loved, loved limitlessly. She and Mr. Kennedy spoke of Mary Kennedy's struggles in recent years, but said the focus should be on her extraordinary heart, intelligence and generosity of spirit. "Let's just know it's not her demons, but everything else about Mary that's important and will always abide," Kerry Kennedy said. So let's not remember her for her despair, but take inspiration from the determination she had to heal her woundedness and all of our woundedness. The Mass, on a clear, warm, sunny morning, was a welcome counterpoint for many mourners to the grim events of the past week, after Mary Kennedy, facing a divorce she dreaded and a long fight with depression, was found in the barn behind the three-level redbrick house she had painstakingly rebuilt. The Westchester County Medical Examiner's Office said on Thursday afternoon that the cause of Ms. Kennedy's death was asphyxiation due to hanging. The release of her body from the medical examiner's office was delayed on Friday after her brother, Thomas W. Richardson, went to court to challenge Mr. Kennedy over control of it. Justice Joan B. Lefkowitz of State Supreme Court in White Plains signed an order directing the medical examiner to turn over the body to the Clark Associates Funeral Home in Katonah, N.Y., which had been preparing for a funeral at Mr. Kennedy's request. The Kennedy family and friends had a wake at their home on Friday night. Her family has scheduled a memorial gathering in Manhattan on Monday. Against that backdrop, the funeral Mass on Saturday was more celebration of her life than bleak coda to its finale.