Conan O’Brien’s Mom Passes Away Just Days After His Dad

Conan O’Brien has suffered a double heartbreak, losing his elderly mother just three days after the death of his father.

The TV host is yet to publicly comment on the loss of his mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, but Bell-O’Dea Funeral Home in Brookline, Massachusetts, said she “passed away peacefully on December 12th, 2024, at age 92.”

Mrs O’Brien’s husband of 66 years, Thomas Francis O’Brien, M.D., died on Dec. 9, aged 95. “My father was in constant motion. And he was interested in everything—absolutely everything,” Conan told the Boston Globe.

O’Brien Sr. spearheaded important work on antibiotic resistance and co-founded and co-directed the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance.

But Conan said he had a funny side. “The loudest I’ve ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie,” he said.

Anyone who only knew Dr. O’Brien through his work “would think, ‘What a fascinating man,’” Conan added. “But he was often the funniest guy in the room. And when he would laugh, his whole body would convulse and he would almost hug himself.”

Ruth, a graduate of Yale Law School (1956), was only one of four women in her law school class and was elected vice president of the student government.

Ruth clerked for Raymond Wilkins, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, before moving into real estate law at Ropes & Gray in Boston over two stints, in the ’50s and ’70s. In 1978, she became the second woman to be named a partner at the firm.

A joint funeral mass will be held for both at 11 a.m. on Dec. 18 at St. Lawrence Church in Brookline. They had lived in the Boston suburb since 1963.