Stretched on her grave

The lives of celebrities can be intoxicating. Their deaths, perhaps even more so. An unknowable person who has influenced us from afar.

That’s what I was thinking when I heard the news that Sinead O’Connor had died at the age of 56. 

I’m not going to lie: I was angry. Just the mention of her name brought me back to 1987 and the moment I heard her beautiful voice howling out “Troy,” her anti-love song with its inspiration grounded in Yeats’ poem, No Second Troy.

I searched through my old cassette collection and found what I was looking for:

“I'd kill a dragon for you

I'll die

But I will rise 

And I will return

The Phoenix from the flame

I have learned

I will rise

And you'll see me return

Being what I am

There is no other Troy

For me to burn”

The lyrics came out of my mouth as if time hadn’t marched on. I had turned up the volume so I could pretend I could hold a tune. 

She had been an inspiration. A songbird filled with longing and rage. Her haunting beauty matched her evocative voice. 

I had missed it.

This also brought me back to the turning point in her career after she ripped up a photograph of the pope and the world turned against her. The subsequent banishment was nothing short of vicious. Blue chip stars voiced rage and mused about their willingness to commit violence against her. And even when that rhetoric receded the mockery did not. In short order, she had become a punchline. 

Honestly, for a very long time, her disappearance from the center stage felt like a gut punch. 

Black Sabbath had written a song in the 70s that asked the listener to imagine if they’d like to see “the pope at the end of a rope” with little uproar and certainly no real jeopardy to their careers. But it was an opinionated woman we just couldn’t abide.

But in so many ways I was wrong.

She hadn’t been silenced. She couldn’t be silenced. 

I just hadn’t listened closely enough.

I had even discounted her own words on the subject of her career-ending performance as a musical guest on a sketch comedy show.

She had been adamant that the career that ended wasn’t hers, it was the career her agents wanted for her; the one that would have afforded them extravagant estates in tropical places. 

Her immediately recognizable voice had never disappeared.

Throughout her career, which spanned 40 years, she stood against the abuse of children; against racial injustice, she supported the rights of women and LGBTQ communities. She had been open about her struggles with mental health.

She kept working and struggling and collaborating and fighting the good fights.

And while her death is most certainly a tragedy, her life is what will always be a revelation.

Her fans have always been stretched on her grave, and we’ll lie here forever.