Personal
In 1992, Irwin and his wife, Kathleen, married. Later that same year, Kathleen gave birth to twins. One of the twins, Ian, was stillborn and the other, Tristan, was born profoundly disabled and microcephalic with the spastic quadriplegia form of cerebral palsy characterized by extremely limited motor skills and cognitive abilities. Two stories and one song on Irwin’s album Crowd Control recount his experiences of loving and living with a severely disabled child. Defying medical expectation (Irwin jokes that Tristan flunked out of in-the-home hospice care for not dying on schedule), Tristan lived to the age of eleven, dying in 2004.
Irwin resides in Covington, Georgia with his wife and their son, Liam (born 1999). Irwin is 6 feet 4 inches (193 cm) tall.
Read more about this topic: Andy Offutt Irwin
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake ... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“It is very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)