Why Sinéad’s Death Feels So Personal
She was us.
With Sinéad O’Connor’s death, another layer of grief settled into the nooks and crannies of my aging spirit.
There was no surprise in it. I’d held a bit of space, expecting this news eventually—in the same way I had held space for the death of my ex-husband.
An uneasy anticipation of her final day loomed over me with a “pending” status for the past year or so, ever since I witnessed her tweets following her son Shane’s death — the little boy she sang of when she spoke to my raging teen spirit in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
How quickly the time goes! That baby, loved fiercely by a brilliant, compassionate young mother, now grown and gone by his own hand after a battle with mental health.
His mother left to negotiate a new reality, searching for where to lay blame — vacillating between the external or the internal culprit.
Her death sits heavy with us — us women of a certain age who grew up bearing witness to Sinead’s public vulnerability and determination to be a serious person in a world that refused to take women seriously.
Sinéad was us.
We saw ourselves in her pain, her anger, her sorrow.
