People crowd the street, most of them women with flecks of silver in their hair and lines on their face etching a map back to who they used to be: young women full of joy and anguish. Weird, creative girls trying to survive the constant pressure of what parents, friends, schools, and institutions said they couldn’t and shouldn’t do. Lonely girls who want to scream and dance and smash convention and patriarchy but feel powerless to do so.
The music in the street gets louder and one woman in the crowd, a grandmother in leather and Doc Martens, pounds on her heart with her fist, eyes closed, oblivious to all those around her as she sings along with Sinéad:
I’ll remember it
And Dublin in a rainstorm
And sitting in the long grass in summer
Keeping warm
I’ll remember it
Every restless night
We were so young then
We thought that everything
We could possibly do was right
Then we moved
Stolen from our very eyes
And I wondered where you went to
Tell me when did the light die
You will rise
You’ll return
The phoenix from the flame
You will learn
You will rise
You’ll return
Being what you are
There is no other Troy
For you to burn
This woman, waiting with the others for the funeral cortège to pass by, is somewhere else, the song and Sinéad’s voice transporting her. I know this because I’ve been there. All her fans have been there.
I wanted to write this several weeks ago but couldn’t cram my inflated emotions into compact words. In musicals when the feelings are too intense, the characters break into song and twirl about the scene, sweeping everyone up into their inner turmoil. Their profound love. Their overwhelming grief.
I have no song. I cannot sing.
But she could sing.
Sinéad.
So many times, she swept me up in a maelstrom of emotion too strong for language, whisking my pain away through her whispers and wailing. Somewhere in that tempest, you surrender the body, twisting, twirling, and flailing, exorcising the trauma, mockery, and broken heart. The sound of her voice drowning it all out until you reach the temporary quiet in the eye of the storm.
Yeah, I’ve been there.
I watch the funeral cortège roll through the seafront in Bray on my little iPad screen. The crowd of mourners collapses in on itself around the hearse. Hands reach out from all directions to touch the car transporting her casket. A black and white photo of Sinéad smiles out at everyone from the rear window, her twinkling eyes surrounded by blue flowers.
I wipe away another tear, part of me wishing that I was there in that coastal Irish town, weeping and dancing with those women. Then again, sitting alone in my small room with my enormous feelings seems appropriate. After all, this is how it’s always been.
Those first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got came along at the right time. I bought them both on cassette at the music store in the mall. For several weeks, they were all I could listen to. I played them over and over until I knew each song by heart. My little 1980s boom box traveled with me from room to room and when my probation officer or mother or whatever boyfriend she had over that day got on my nerves, I turned Sinéad’s voice up louder, and she protected me.
Because she understood. She knew life under the same roof with a cruel mother. She sang and let me sing along with her and in doing so, gave me some relief from the dizzying storm of rage and sadness and alienation. Sinéad once said that her own mother had “no capacity for love.” I don’t know if that’s true of my own mother. Evidence supports it, but I don’t want to believe it. Either way, by the age of 15, I was in over my head. I acted out. Shoplifting, truancy, drinking and partying. I found myself locked up in various places, but I was in Colorado in the 80s, so I didn’t end up anywhere as bleak as a Magdalene asylum.
Still, I felt less alone.
Studying the cover photo of The Lion and the Cobra, I wished I could be that bold. That I could give fewer fucks about what people thought of my appearance and do something as daring as shaving off all my hair.
So I just shaved off part of it.
My mother glared at me across the dinner table. “What the hell did you do to your head?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you have any hair on either side of your head?”
I shrugged. “Didn’t want any.”
Then the screaming began. This was the routine when my makeup was wrong, when she noticed my ear suddenly had 6 pierced holes instead of one. When my hand-me-down clothes were “customized” with Sharpie pens and scissors.
“Guys don’t like girls who dress like that,” she’d say.
“I don’t care.”
“You should care. Why would any guy want a girl who does these things to herself?”
Too many times, I sat through my mother’s tirades about “what guys like” as though she were their chosen representative, sent by the “guys” to correct wayward girls from deviating from their strict criteria. While I didn’t have the maturity to see it at the time, she was telling me that my value came from what men like because that’s how she measured her own value. It wasn’t her fault. That’s what the world has been telling women for centuries.
But Sinéad knew better.
Mom wasn’t completely incorrect, though.
Not long before I replaced those cassette tapes with CDs, me and my friends passed a joint around in a dark living room, the only light coming from the glow of the gigantic console TV on the floor. My three friends were all dudes, which didn’t seem relevant at the time. We were having a lot of laughs and exchanging ideas that seemed exciting and profound. Thinking we sounded smart while spouting off our life philosophies and future plans, digging into relating to one another. Bonding. Nodding along to one another as we talked while holding our breath to maintain the hit as long as possible, then exhaling another thick plume of smoke to the hazy air. These were my people. Nobody was paying attention to the screen as MTV provided the background music for our late-night hang.
Until Sinéad sauntered onto the screen along with the opening drum beats of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The outburst of laughter caught me by surprise. Loud, wheezing, hysterical laughter. “Aww, you guys,” my pathetic whine, coming out in slow motion thanks to all the weed. “You guys, I love her.”
My plaintive defense spattered across them like a spray of gasoline on an open flame. Their hysteria and guffaws increased in volume. They clutched their bellies and wiped the giddy tears away from their red faces. The more I defended, the faster the beat of the music became, the more Sinéad flailed and twirled on the screen, and the more hilarious my friends found the whole situation.
A crack of thunder went off somewhere inside me and as I surveyed the room that had been a scene of easy fun and camaraderie moments ago. I saw the image with the filter removed. These were not my people. We are what we love, so as they mocked and jeered my hero, they mocked me. They mocked all those lonely times in my room where I danced and howled until the world went away.
The guys went on laughing and I watched the rest of the video as Sinéad sang.
The cortège continues on, nearly finished making its way through the town to the cemetery for Sinéad’s burial. I’m still sitting at my desk, alone in my room with my tears. This is how it’s always been. Me, alone in a room with her music. Before the internet, I never had anyone to share her with. No one to crank up “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” with, or dance along to “Jerusalem” with.
Sure, I’d mention being a fan to someone. At best, I’d get a shrug and a “never really got into her.” At worse, a sneer, a head shake, or an eye roll. A shaved head? Ripping up a photo of the Pope? She was crazy. Yeah, dudes can look however they want to and bite the heads off animals and that’s cool. I learned that being a Sinéad O’Connor fan meant taking on some of the scorn and derision, carrying a small fraction of what was happening to her. After I found online communities of other people who loved her as much as I did, it was easy to see that none of us minded carrying some of the negativity. After all, it was nothing compared to what Sinéad herself took on. She was a badass and like most badasses, she took on more than her share of the world’s pain.
For so many GenX girls, she was a Joan of Arc, a Cassandra who spoke the truth, then was ridiculed, threatened, and silenced. She sobbed and screamed her soul to the world and was burned at the stake for it (in the US, anyway). She pushed back when people told her who and what to be, showing us that we could be aggressive, we could fight and be soft; howl with rage and grief, yet nurture and soothe. That we don’t need to ask for permission to express dissatisfaction, pain, or to assert our self-worth. Sinéad O’Connor was, and still is, a patron saint not only of us graying GenX girls, but all the weird girls. Abused, lonely, misunderstood, and alienated girls. Creative and angry girls who know that sometimes, being on the blacklist is better than the guest list.
For those of us who are all too familiar with the fact that even though our outrage is justified, it’s often used as an excuse to dismiss and disparage us. To write us off as crazy bitches.
Now, even those who clutched their pearls in reaction to an image of a photo being torn in half on live TV love her. Part of me feels like Morrissey, disgusted by the human tendency to revile an artist only to laud them before the bodies are even cold. I’m not sure which is worse, the virtue signaling outrage, or adoration. I guess it doesn’t matter now. She’s gone and we all failed her.
I put my iPad away, blow my nose again, and go to the kitchen to make a sandwich. I have the house to myself for the rest of the afternoon. I spend it writing on my current WIP, and doing some drawing. Then, the air inside this little bungalow feels too still and quiet, so I open Spotify (my cassettes and CDs a thing of the past) and push the volume as far as it will go. I think of those women singing and weeping in the streets of Bray, letting Sinéad’s voice transport me again. I sing and twirl, howling and flailing my arms as I’ve always done when I’m alone with her, and while it’s the same as it’s always been, the tears in my eyes have changed. They’re no longer a lonely expression of adolescent anguish I don’t know how to articulate, but bittersweet, grateful, and experienced in loss.