Kimberley Kitching’s touching final gesture

As Kimberley Kitching worried about whether her parliamentary career was about to be taken away from her, she still had kindness for others in her heart.

Kimberley Kitching with beloved dog.

On the final day of her life, as Kimberley Kitching worried about whether her parliamentary career was about to be taken away from her, she drove to the bakery.

The Labor senator wanted to bring home a treat for her husband Andrew Landeryou. He found it on the passenger seat of her car on the side of the road in Strathmore, where she had suffered a suspected heart attack.

“Despite what had been a frantically busy and stressful day, she’d taken time of all things to buy me a pie,” Landeryou told mourners at her funeral.

“It’s a poignant reminder to me of her thoughtfulness.”

Landeryou was surrounded by memories in St Patrick’s Cathedral on Monday. It was where they married in 2000, the culmination of what close friend Bill Shorten described as a “genuine love story”.

They met at a Young Labor weekend in the 1990s, and while they bonded over their reverence of Paul Keating, Landeryou was distracted.

Kitching's husband Andrew Landeryou delivered a heartfelt eulogy. Picture: David Caird

“I couldn’t stop looking at those beautiful blue eyes,” he said.

“I see them still, and I hope I always will.”

Kitching was “her customary 45 minutes late” to their wedding, Landeryou said, but she approached the day as she did the rest of her life, booking two choirs because “she didn’t believe in half measures”.

Years later, when Shorten’s six-year-old daughter wanted to eat dinner at a Titanic-themed restaurant in Williamstown, Kitching insisted they “got into the act and dressed in Edwardian dinner couture”. She had no time to waste on the then-Labor leader’s embarrassment.

“Her smile and eyes would glow and she would let out her enormous democratic laugh,” Shorten remembered.

Kitching's was farewell at St Patrick Cathedral, the same place she wed her husband. Picture: David Caird

Kitching’s wholehearted approach was the same in love as it was in politics.

Landeryou said she was the “truest and staunchest of Labor true believers” who “fought like a lioness” for her members in the Health Services Union, for repressed minority groups overseas, for the underdog.

It baffled her that this was used against her by some in her party, down to her final days when her factional rivals delayed confirming her preselection for another term in the Senate.

“Politics can be — maybe it even has to be — fickle,” Landeryou said.

“But Kimberley was not.”