It'll be seven hours and fifteen days (at least) before I can think about the apparent suicide of Sinéad O' Connor without a certain resentment. How could she? How could she do that to herself? To her children? After they'd all already lost her son, Shane? The beautiful voice. The guts to rip up a photo of the pope onstage.
I wish she hadn't deprived us all of her company. The despair was all too obvious, but her personality was so large no one succeeded in containing the destructive parts. "Loneliness is a crowded room," is a saying she says she understood after becoming famous. In her 2020 interview with Tommy Tiernan she admitted to having been "very lonesome" and "seriously in danger of dying" and to trying anything, in public, to stay alive. She mentioned a poem a woman wrote about blending into the plaster in her family home. Tiernan brought up "acute pain"and she confessed to this too, and to having agoraphobia. She didn't "nurture friendships," she said, and then most people didn't "like me," and she didn't trust people: "I'm not really good at making friends."
She described herself as a Muslim, saying: "Muslims believe nothing in this world should be worshipped but God, and that's how I feel."
The picture of the pope she ripped up on Saturday Night Live came from the wall of her mother's room. I can see how ripping up what her mean mother worshipped--or affected to worship--could be deeply satisfying; "fight the real enemy" she said,
And yes: a bunch of men and women sworn to celibacy and granted authority are not all bad, but they aren't on a good path. O'Connor dared to say so to a religious American audience in 1992, to make people aware of child abuse a good ten years before most media outlets paid attention to the Magdalen laundries, the dead babies, the abuse of effeminate boys and rebellious girls. Holding that pope responsible was one brave move.
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