It was just before Christmas last year, when writer and Irish Times contributor Laura Kennedy received the news that her father - a man she hadn’t seen in more than ten years - was dying.
Kennedy, who is from Limerick but is now based in Canberra, Australia, was told her estranged father “only had a few hours left” to live. “I went to bed that night in Australia, kind of knowing that when I woke up, he would be gone,” she says.
On the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, Kennedy speaks candidly about the grief that followed his death. “It does constitute this really meaningful change in your life when a parent dies and in this case… the thing that really affected me and struck me as this kind of profound tragedy was that my life materially looked exactly the same”.
“I think the sad thing is that I haven’t lost a father because I didn’t have one and that is a really confusing scenario,” she tells podcast presenter Róisín Ingle.
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As a child, Kennedy’s father struggled with addiction and was “sort of in and out” of her life, depending on whether or not he was sober. “I think sometimes he would have bouts of sobriety and maybe bouts of guilt and a sense of wanting to be more responsible and he would try to reconnect during those times. But it would always very quickly devolve back to the mayhem,” she says.
As she grew older, the contact between them diminished. “It was profoundly damaging to be around him and also for him to not be around. So it was kind of a lose-lose [situation] - he was in many ways a kind of looming figure in his absence throughout my life”.
Although there are no exact figures regarding family estrangement in Ireland, research from the US and UK estimates that one in every four families are affected by it. Kennedy notes however, that it’s not often a decision taken lightly by those involved.
“When it’s kind of volitional, usually it is a very carefully considered decision that somebody has made… and there’s an enormous process of grief that happens when you decide to sort of leave someone, cut them loose in that way,” she explains.
Although she acknowledges this process can be “unbearably difficult”, she maintains “the cost of not doing it sometimes is so high that you lose yourself in attempting to maintain the relationship, and that’s too high a cost”.
Laura Kennedy contributes to The Irish Times and writes on substack. Her book Some Of Our Parts is out now.
You can listen back to this conversation in full in the player above or search The Women’s Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
