Broadcaster and journalist Mary Kennedy has opened up about the devastation of losing her father when she was just 21 years old and working abroad – he died unexpectedly
Mary Kennedy
Former RTÉ broadcaster Mary Kennedy has opened up about the sudden death of her father when she was just 21 years old.
Mary was close with her dad, and he died unexpectedly when she was living abroad.
“I love life, I love people, I love places, so I couldn’t really say that I was happier at one point than I am here. It would be easier for me to say when I was unhappy, and there are three [times] that spring to mind,” she said.
“The first is when I was teaching English in France when I was 21 and my father died suddenly while playing golf at the age of 59. I came home not having been told that he was dead. The period after that was very difficult.
“My mother died 20 years ago, but she was in her 80s, and it was much better than my dad’s timing because we had time to say goodbye and to tell her that we loved her, so it wasn’t the same blackness.”
Mary explained that after her dad passed away, she returned to France, but a surprise was waiting for her. “We used to write letters to each other. When I got back to Brittany after his funeral, about two days later, a letter from him arrived [with] gossip from home and what had happened at the St Patrick’s Day parade before he died.
“It was so tough because it was so raw. It was also the first experience I had of someone dying.”
Mary added that another very sad time in her life was when her marriage ended. “I was working full-time in RTÉ at that time, and I did feel like, ‘Will I ever work again?’ But that was a different Ireland. There was a sense of failure obviously, but you get on with it. I think everybody gets married wanting for it to last forever, and when it doesn’t, it’s very sad,” she told the Irish Independent.
Mary was also very close to her mother, but she said previously she wished she had learned more about her personal life.
“We were very close,” she said. “My mother was a wonderful support for me, she was a support when the children were small, she was a support when I separated, she would do anything. She always made herself available,” she told RSVP.
“But I don’t know what colour her bridesmaid dresses were, I don’t know what she had for her wedding breakfast, as it was in those days. I know she and my father were wonderful for going to dress dances, she had ballroom shoes and Latin shoes up in the bedroom and I would go as a kid and try them on, but I never as an adult spoke to her about it. I would have liked to have had more of a personal relationship with my mother. It was all about business.”
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