Best of The Women's Podcast: Grieving an estranged parent
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What prompted this conversation about grieving an estranged parent?
Welcome back to the Women's Podcast. I'm Roisin Ingle. Hope you're all doing really well and enjoying your summer. If you want to get in touch with us, we're on social at IT Women's Podcast, or you can email thewomenspodcast at irishtimes.com. We love hearing from you. Now, we're still on a little bit of a summer break. enjoying the holidays. But we're going to bring you this episode with Laura Kennedy, which was recorded back in February when she was talking about the death of her estranged father. Laura is always such a good guest and her contribution this time was something I know got a lot of you talking. So here she is, Laura Kennedy. Now, the death of a parent is a difficult time for everyone.
But what's it like when you're estranged from your father or mother when they die? Laura Kennedy wrote about this complicated kind of grief on her excellent Substack recently and about a deeply personal reckoning reflecting on the death late last year of her estranged father, a man she hadn't seen in a decade, a person whose life was marked by addiction, chaos and long absences. Laura talked to me about the strange, unsettling reality of losing a parent whose death changes almost nothing in your daily life. This isn't a neat story of forgiveness or blame. Laura is much more interested in the nuance of this experience and how a parent's role can be both damaging and formative. As regular listeners to this podcast will know, Laura is a philosopher, someone who doesn't operate in moral certainties, which is why I think you're going to find this conversation so engaging.
And just to say, Laura Kennedy's brilliant book, Some of Our Parts, is out now in paperback. I found our chat really moving and I hope you get lots to think about in this conversation. Laura, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. You wrote an extraordinary piece on your sub stack, which everyone should read, by the way, about the death of your father, a man you hadn't seen in more than a decade. And family estrangement is something I don't think we talk enough about. So I wanted to have you on about it. And first of all, is it appropriate to say sorry for your loss? I don't know.
I don't know either, to be honest. So, I mean, I take the sentiment as it's meant, but it is complicated, isn't it? Because that's what you say to somebody. And you say that kind of on the, I suppose, the presupposition that the relationship, the parent-child relationship in this case, that it works a particular way. And that, you know, it does constitute this really meaningful change in your life when a parent dies. And in this case, materially, I think that when I heard about it, the thing that really affected me and struck me as this kind of profound tragedy was that my life materially looked exactly the same. And it felt like that just should not be the case, but it was. So when you say sorry for your loss, I understand kind of that statement means I care about how this may be affecting you.
But in terms of having lost something, I think the sad thing is that in my case, sort of in terms of relationships, I haven't lost, you know, a father. Because I didn't have one. And that is a confusing scenario.
Tell us then about not having a father and what the situation was. You wrote about it a little bit in your book, Some of Our Parts, which is out in paperback now, which also everybody should read. It's a fantastically wonderful book. Tell us about your father and about your relationship with him.
I guess it's a bit ironic for someone who's kind of professionally in part written about lots of aspects of my life and how I grew up. But I've always kind of talked about my father in the past tense because I guess my relationship with him was kind of in the past tense, but also he was living. So it didn't feel that I kind of had an entitlement, I suppose, to write about him in that way.
How did Laura Kennedy describe her childhood relationship with her father?
And I didn't really know How to, which again sounds weird for someone who kind of spends their time trying to figure out how to write about sort of difficult things or life related challenges.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What prompted this conversation about grieving an estranged parent?
0:15–4:21
2
How did Laura Kennedy describe her childhood relationship with her father?
4:21–10:50
3
When and why did estrangement from her father develop over time?
10:50–21:11
4
What happened when Laura visited her father during his near-death hospital stay?
21:11–28:33
5
How did Laura find out about her father's death and what was her immediate reaction?
28:33–31:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Women's Podcast
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