Comedian Conan O'Brien lost both his parents with three days of each other; his father passed away on December 9, and his mother on December 12.
His parents were exceptionally accomplished. In addition to raising their family of six children in Brookline, Massachusetts, Dr. Thomas Francis O'Brien was the director of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and Ruth Reardon O'Brien was a lawyer and the second woman to be named partner at the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray.
O'Brien came to fame as a TV host, but in his new role as podcaster, he's had more time to talk about his personal life, and he's talked a lot about his parents. He has comedically caricaturized his mother as constantly being exasperated at her rambunctious children as she tried to maintain a respectable family image. And he depicted his father being forever puzzled by his son's silly sense of humor.
In one episode of "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend," he joked:
"I always feel badly for my mom because I think deep down she really wanted us to be the kind of kids that could go to a country club. And we just weren't. We were Irish pirates."
He imagines himself as a child interviewing at a country club, shouting:
"What shall I tell my mother? Shall I tell her that we're in, and and we can come here and eat peanut butter and jam sandwiches? … So about this country club application. Where do I sign? And where do my fifteen brothers and sisters sign, who were all born the same day? And where do we check "inbred"? Hey, is that a golf course? Can we play? We've got hockey sticks!"
In an interview with his hometown Boston Globe by Bryan Marquard (link here), O'Brien said that his father instilled a love of travel in him.
""My dad was the dreamer. My dad was the one who was saying 'I'm off to Peru with a change of clothes in my briefcase to try and launch this website for a hospital there high in the mountains,' " O'Brien said.
"My mother was the realist," he said. "As my dad was rushing around doing this incredible work, my mom was the one who really saw to it when we were little kids that we were fed and our clothes were laid out, and that we got to our dental appointments and medical appointments."
His mother, he added, "was heroic" — a sort of Clark Kent, quick-change superhero. "She's doing all this mom stuff," he said, "and when that was done, rushing into a phone booth and becoming Ruth O'Brien, second woman partner at Ropes & Gray.""
