Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

129 Postscript There are differing recollections about the disposal of Keith Carmody’s remains. According to his nephew Peter Bergstrom, an urn containing his ashes sat for some time on a mantelpiece in his mother Dorothy’s house. Jill Stewart believes that her sister Kelly and mother, Ruth, took charge of them. The nearest approach to common ground is the belief that the Mosman local council refused to allow his ashes to be spread on the oval where he’d played before the war. Eventually, at a date unspecified, family members did the deed in the dead of night. Ruth Carmody died on 22 January 1991 after a long battle with gall bladder and liver cancer. She had bequeathed her body to Kelly’s alma mater, Dalhousie University, but a mistake by the attending doctor at the time of death meant it couldn’t be used for medical research and was cremated. Despite her fragmented relationship with her father over many years – and convinced he was her mother’s ‘one true love’ – Kelly felt the remains should be taken back to Australia. Her plan with Jill to bury the ashes in the rose garden of Christ Church, Claremont, Perth was abandoned with the discovery that the garden had shrunk appreciably in the years since their parents’ marriage in 1949. Fearing that future changes might obliterate it entirely, the two daughters disposed of the ashes in no less furtive fashion in the back garden of the Kalamunda house Keith had built for Ruth and their daughters.