Laura Kennedy

speaker

254 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Laura Kennedy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Women's Podcast · Best of The Women's Podcast: Grieving an estranged parent · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

He was sort of, I think, what an Irish person might consider the platonic form of an alcoholic.

Well, if you look, you know, if you look the word up in the dictionary, if we still did dictionaries, there his photo would be, you know, that he was sort of a textbook.

chronic, irretrievably lost to addiction, alcoholic.

So he was sort of in and out of my life a bit when I was a kid.

I had an excellent, like profoundly wonderful mother who was so supportive of us seeing him when he was sober, provided he was sober, but he was almost never sober.

And, you know, despite her valiant efforts to kind of protect us from the situation with him, it was, of course, profoundly damaging to be around him and also for him to not be around.

So it was kind of, I guess, a lose-lose.

You know, he was in many ways a kind of looming figure in his absence throughout my life.

And whenever he would eventually roll back around, which he would every once in a while, even into my adulthood,

And he turned up again when my mother was terminally ill, when I was in my kind of mid twenties, which was a horrendous time.

And I think as he always kind of did,

just because he couldn't be any other way, made a really difficult situation just infinitely more difficult for everybody.

So I think my relationship with him has mostly been throughout my life, sort of trying to figure out and understand his behaviour in my own head from a really young age to now, I suppose.

And contextualize that and figure out what it means and sort of, I suppose, find the contours of the damage that his behavior kind of wreaked on all of us within his life and figure out what to do with that, because it's, you know, it's my problem to deal with.

Yeah, I mean, this is nuts as well, because I remember being at school one time and another girl asked me, like, where's your dad?

I think he's about 14.

And I went, I don't know.

I was like, how would you expect me to know?

And she's like, he's your dad.

How do you not know?

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