I never wanted to be anywhere else.My siblings and I have all led wonderful lives thanks to the home Joan and Mick created.I could fill a book with my parents' acts of kindness and bravery and fun and guidance and selflessness. Just because the illness may not be outwardly visible doesn’t mean the person suffering from it isn’t struggling.”Saoirse’s struggle ended Thursday, one month before she was to return to Boston College for her senior year. Her mother, Grace, was a housewife and organist at the local church, St Aidan's.One of six children, she grew up surrounded by love but the quiet life did not appeal.She took a job in the city and was lucky enough to be in Melbourne the day the Beatles waved to their fans from the balcony of the Southern Cross Hotel in 1964.Mum liked the Beatles but she was keener on Elvis Presley.For the first eight years of my life, she had me believing she used to go out with The King.
He told me that Courtney looked pathetic in her neck brace and that there were so many flowers in her apartment it felt like being at a wake.His opinion changed, dramatically, the next night during dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, when he realized they both had a dark sense of humor. She was taught by nuns in elementary school, then came to Boston to go to Milton Academy.“I was 15,” she told me. She was gorgeous, and Paul was absolutely delighted, the new-dad smile plastered across his face. "A generation later, outside our local supermarket, Dad would see a Legacy collector and make a beeline to give him a "coupla bob". I found an e-mail she sent me last year, after her dad asked me to get her into a panel discussion on Ireland that I was moderating at Boston College. He got sicker and sicker over the next two years and died in 1972.
Paul was beaming and going on and on about Saoirse and freedom, freedom and Saoirse.And in my head, I hear Janis Joplin, before heroin robbed us of her, singing that sad but terribly true refrain, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. "We never wanted for anything. Whenever Paul mentioned Saoirse in his e-mails, I remembered that proud new-papa face when he showed me her baby picture.Courtney was just a child when her father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 while campaigning for the presidency. But while thousands of Melburnians are already putting back the first coffee or perhaps making the late dash after a sluggish start, Paul Kennedy is already knocking off. A lot of the boys Paul grew up with joined the IRA and hit back.Paul was a nationalist but didn’t believe in violence. The bride's mother played the organ.Dad and his best mates from Sydney downed a few ales before the ceremony, just to settle the nerves.As guests gathered around the wedding party for photos — my mother and father looking like movie stars, albeit slightly stunned by all the attention — Mum's uncle Bert was heard to say the marriage wouldn't last long.Bert was a punter. “I wasn’t rebellious, like the boys.