Just Like U Said It Would B
I went to a tribute concert for Sinead O Connor this week at the City Winery and got to sit with her discography and reflect on her rebel spirit over the course of the night as different guests took the stage to cover her songs including Amanda Palmer and one of my all-time favorite musicians and collaborators Bilal.
Bilal’s rendition of Just How You Said It Would B was eerie and brought back feelings I had the same week of her death.
I wrote a reflection shortly after Sinead’s death in July and felt compelled to return to it this week.
Sinead passed the same week as a young actor called Angus Cloud, who played Fez from the show Euphoria.
He lost his Father in May and died of an accidental overdose soon after.
Autopsies found Fentanyl.
Sinead lost her son a year prior to her own death and wrote on July 17 that she’d ‘been living as undead night creature since.’
Yesterday an article appeared in the NY Times regarding the shooter in Maine and how he had made numerous claims that he felt dangerous to himself and to others or what sounded to me like ‘cries for help’.
Matthew Perry died this week unresponsive in a bath.
I remember when Whitney also died this way.
I remember Amy. My first true kindred musical spirit.
I remember Mac Miller.
In moments like these I am struck with many ‘what ifs.’
I question my own role as part of a culture that often fails to protect people in times when they need it most. I am haunted by these cries for help we hear about after celebrities die. News of their ongoing struggles with mental health and addiction.
There is no closure to death in this life, no neat bow that helps us process it all in a linear way and make sentimental sense of it, but it feels like it honors those we’ve lost to reflect on what their deaths also say about us.
To question the impact of fame, celebrity, attention, grief and trauma and what it has done to so many we love in the entertainment industries.
To think about what weights they were carrying.
What it took for them to do what they did.
To ask ourselves if we are listening, closely enough.
Or are we caught up in the same frenzy that it made it impossible for them to keep going?
To take time to live with the words they said…. Somehow they hit different now.
I can’t help but sense the prophetic in songs like this one. There’s a quiet knowing, a confidence in a coming peace… and an eerie admission that maybe sometimes we see the worst coming and don’t act soon enough.
We talk a lot about life but we must often talk about death.
My hearts is heavy today as I struggle to make sense of how much death is all around us and how we keep feeding into the systems that make them all the more likely. There is no greater reckoning than death to forces our eyes open and our hearts into soft submission. May we honor those gone by letting them speak truth into the lives we have left.
Here are those words from a week of grieving in July of this year.
As I sit here, reflecting on the death of Sinead O-Connor and Angus Cloud, I am struck by how many times they cried for help. I am struck by how candid they both have been about their struggles.
It is scary at the edge, and they both likely lived there many times of their life.
Both took their lives after the death of a loved one. Sinead’s son. Angus’s Father.
Perhaps fearful that they cannot go on without them.
Both longing for the transcendent.
One reaches for chemicals, one for religion.
Did fear of this life (as they knew it) lead them to believe the next life is worth more than this wretched one? They might be right. Things feel grim and disconnected and hedonistic and divided. Sometimes the only things getting you through are certain people. And then, suddenly, they’re gone?
How can we continue to live without the foundation they provided?
Floating.
Spiritual longing and wanderlust.
The adventurous minds who paint our stories in colour.
The artist.
The shaman.
We lift them up.
But now they are unable to root.
The dancer without gravity.
The addict with a limitless stash.
The fire set rampant across the vast forest.
Without stopping, it spreads and permeates and intensifies and calcifies.
And eventually, the pain of staying begins to outweigh whatever scary, unknown, potentially infinite possibility exists on the other side of death.
I sit here, reflecting on the transitions and the magnetic sparks of these two human beings. I feel their spirits slowly detach and let go of this earth, I feel them almost slide into the next world, I lift thanks, for the ways Sinead and Angus pushed us to see ourselves.
What are we doing when our youth are crying for help? Are we listening?
What are doing when singers, rappers and musicians are dying over and over again to the same causes?
Why are we feeding fame and idol worship culture more than ever when we are becoming so devastatingly cognizant of how deeply it is wounding those who seek it? It’s like no one ever really told them what they were signing up for.
You work and work and work and feed and feed and feed those hungry voices but they never get satiated, they never tire, they just get hungrier.
Sinead and Angus are everywhere now, just like my friend Emily. I spend a lot of time with her now, maybe more than I did when she was alive, because now I sense her boundless light in a subtle glow all around me. There are things she can show me only now that she’s gone…. in the wide open spaces she occupies, in the air and silence after the music stops. She needed to paint with a bigger brush. I just pray I keep listening for the whispers when they appear like a tickle in my throat.
Till next time,
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