TED KENNEDY BEREFT AS SISTER EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER DIES

Ted Kennedy inconsolable as beloved sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver dies at 88.

The Kennedy sister and Special Olympics founder passed "quietly into that good night" at 2 AM Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, her family said in a statement.

At her bedside was last surviving brother Teddy, husband Sargent Shriver who founded the Pace Corps and is battl;ing Alzheimer's, daughter Maria Shriver, her hubby Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and close family and friends.

''Eunice Shriver is all the things that Kennedy women are - long, lean, athletic, toothy, pearl-necklaced, prolific, clannish, energetic," filmmaker Nora Ephron described Eunice in 1966.

"She is also a few things that Kennedy women are not - intellectual, witty, and committed in a whole, social sense that none of her sisters or sisters-in-law can match.''

Sen. Kennedy who's been battling brain cancer put on a brave face, hiding the sorrows and all the gravitas of being the last of the Camelot era, remembering his big sister as a "young girl with great humor, sharp wit, and a boundless passion to make a difference."

"She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us -- much is expected of those of whom much has been given," Kennedy said.

"Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough."