Suzanne Harrington: Sinéad O'Connor was reviled when she should have been revered
We dared to call Sinéad O'Connor ‘troubled’. Who wouldn’t be, dealing with that level of trauma, before you ever add the mad layers of fame and misogyny under which she laboured all her adult life? Picture: Michel Linssen/Redferns
It’s hard to write anything about Sinéad O’Connor that will not already have been written in the outpouring of (far too late) appreciation for her, now that she’s dead. And yet to not write about her seems disrespectful. She demands our attention, even though she’s no longer here; like Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
She was reviled when she should have been revered, her brand of filterless rage and singularity of purpose permissible only in male artists. Instead we saddled her with words like ‘troubled’.
We’re the same age, Sinéad and I, and so grew up in the same Ireland, the one that allowed all the horror to happen to women and girls and babies and children. Mostly nameless, a few whose names – like Ann Lovett – we will never forget.
Sinéad experienced the horror herself, and carried it with her, expelling it through that voice and that music, even as the world tried to silence her. Then there was all the twisting and turning in search of solace and spiritual identity.
Eighteen months ago, the worst thing that could happen happened. Her child died. Not just died, but took his own life, at an age so tender the agony can only ever remain unimaginable. How do you come back from that? How do you ever recover?
It’s one thing when a parent ends their own life – tragic, wrenching, awful – but your trajectory still remains forward facing. You will still grow up. You will get the therapy, the counselling, the peer support, and you will keep growing, until one day you’re an adult yourself, perhaps with a deeper understanding of mental ill-health. With deeper coping skills, perhaps greater empathy for those going through stuff. The suicide of a parent is shocking, damaging, unforgettable – but you can recover from it.
But can you recover from the suicide of a child? Or does it subsume you, cut off your own forward trajectory? Where do you go, other than in on yourself?
While it’s not uncommon for older adults to lose an adult child to suicide – my children’s paternal grandmother was 70 when her son, their dad, took his own life in his early forties – in Ireland, just one in ten thousand teenagers die by suicide. Sinéad O’Connor’s son was one of them. He was 17.
She was jammed between violent death – her mother in a car crash when Sinéad was a teen herself, and her son when he was still legally a child. And yet we dared to call her ‘troubled’. Who wouldn’t be, dealing with that level of trauma, before you ever add the mad layers of fame and misogyny under which she laboured all her adult life?
Unless you’ve lived it, the suicide of your child – at any age, but especially one who is still legally a child themselves – puts you in a distant prison, locked away from the rest of human experience. An unimaginable place. And yet this is where Sinéad O’Connor became incarcerated – until she made her escape. Rest well.
- If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please click here for a list of support services.
