A Part of me Dies

Mourning public figures as an act of excavation

Yesterday I saw, like most everyone else, that Sinéad O’Connor has died.

I remember being very young, home alone (I was almost always alone) and watching Nothing Compares 2 U on TV. Being struck then, as I am now, not only by Sinéad’s beautiful face, but her eyes. Their directness and authentic fierceness, which slowly transforms to sadness as she begins singing about her mother.

There was so much I couldn’t understand back then. I didn’t understand why I was left alone so much by my mother, or that the abuses I’d already endured weren’t my fault. I was aged 10 when the video was released, already writing terrible things about myself in my journal— that I was fat, ugly, and selfish. I watched Sinéad and imagined her life, as I imagined the lives of all of the beautiful people I saw on TV. Surely she was happy, rich, and surrounded with joy. But there was something in the video that felt very real, unlike so much of what I saw on TV. Unlike so much of what I perceived to be reality, in the absence of my own experiences. In my lived experience of pop culture, these authentic moments stand out to me like bright flowers in a dead landscape.

O’Connor grew up in a different time from me, but her childhood was rife with abuse, like my own. She had a fraught relationship with her mother. In an interview she said she loved her mother deeply, but her mother was also her abuser. I relate to this. To the pain of loving someone so much despite the pain they caused you.

When I was nineteen I shaved my head like O’Connor often did, and maybe for the same reasons. She did it, she said, because it kept her safe from men. I shaved my head in mourning after a close friend died of an overdose, but the side effect was exactly that. My shaved head helped me understand the strength of the male gaze; how I searched for it as I walked down the street and how attuned I was to its presence. When I shaved my head I learned that I’d already spent nearly half my life seeking the male gaze, like a sunflower following the sun’s path across the sky.

I’m not going to pretend that I continued listening to Sinéad. I did beg for her album, on tape, and I got it and listened to it, but I went for a long time after that without listening to any of her music. In the past few years I had started listening to her albums, each of them different and unique but all permeated with a strong sense of selfhood. Selfhood is not something static, as pop culture would have us think. It’s mutable and ever-changing. So is art.

It wasn’t necessarily Sinéad’s music but her character that had a profound effect on my life. Her unwillingness to be a pop star, her unwillingness to adhere to the rules of celebrity and fame, and her dedication to her artistic project of exploration in her music is something we often perceive as rare. When I think of artists like Sinéad I think of Fiona Apple, Abbas Kiarostami, and Zora Neale Hurston. Art that’s mutable and resists categorization also often resists commodification, because it can’t quite be replicated or miniaturized for easy consumption.

Her art was inextricably connected to her willingness to go there— to call out the pope on live television, to be open about her mental health struggles, to ask fans for help when she needed it, and her willingness to go there was often perceived by much of the public as weaknesses. She should have been able to control herself.

We hold our celebrities up to the highest standards. Last night, after crying for a while, I Googled Amy Winehouse, another singer I loved from the United Kingdom. I remember her spiraling and how it was depicted by the news media, with bold print and exclamation points, paparazzi following her everywhere, harassing her. How many lives were financed by Winehouse’s public struggle with substances? And why is it so often women who are treated this way? Is the public gaze also the scrutinizing male gaze?

We hold our celebrities up to the highest standards. We claim that mental health is important, yet we shame and isolate people when they have breakdowns and meltdowns, or publicize them on social media, commenting and speculating about them as if we know the inner workings of their lives.

O’Connor’s son died by suicide less than two years ago. I lost my mother to suicide over ten years ago and it’s still an open wound. Survivors of suicide are at a much higher risk for PTSD, depression, and suicidal behaviors. This is something I’ve observed in myself. Suicide is always a complicated death, and often results in complicated grief, which is much different than the grief associated with someone who died of cancer or old age.

This is a question I’m left with: why, when someone shares their grief on social media, or their anger, or exhibits “unstable” behavior and “negative” emotions, do people react with speculation rather than care? Why not simply flood someone with love? Why write news articles about it, as if this behavior isn’t totally warranted, even normal?

Grief, rage, sadness. These are all natural states of being that many of us are shamed for. Especially women. No— men too. But for women and femmes who express these emotions publicly, whether they’re public figures or not, there is an attached stigma. People are downers. They need help. but what does “help” consist of? What if “help” is love and support from the people surrounding them; from their community? And what if those experiencing grief, rage, and sadness act out from those emotions? What if they yell or lash out or cry or break down? What do we do then?

So much in our society right now tells us not to tolerate this kind of behavior from people, and I am not saying we should allow ourselves to be abused, but there has to be a middle ground.

My mom died by suicide when she was 52. She had an entire life ahead of her, yet she felt that she couldn’t start over because she was no longer young. Sometimes I wonder how our attachment to anti-aging affects those of us who present as feminine. What does it mean to age in a world that discards us for showing signs of aging? That privileges youth?

O’Connor was young when she was roundly rejected for tearing up the picture of the pope. She was beautiful. And youth isn’t protective, by any means. In a way, I feel freer now that I am older because I am no longer so strongly a subject of the male gaze in public, which was always stifling to me.

It would be an interesting exercise to trace the way media covered O’Connor throughout her lifetime, and how that coverage intensified with social media. What was the effect of this coverage on O’Connor herself? Something that isn’t discussed very often is how we are becoming consumers of ourselves, having our public images reflected back to us as if they represent our whole selves. The internet cannot contain an entire person. We are too complex. And we forget that, I think.

Amy Winehouse buying an issue of The Sun, a magazine that closely followed her spiraling behavior.

We are all subject to the public gaze now.

The lines between celebrity and regular human are blurring because of social media. Young people want to be influencers. To be famous for fame’s sake. Does this mean they want simply to be seen? Admired? And if so, where is that coming from? What absence is it feeding, if any?

I admire O’Connor’s strength. Some may see her strength as a weakness. Her transparency as some sort of character flaw. But as someone who is quite transparent online, I do know that some of my openness comes from a place of needing to be seen and heard; needing to feel a sense of connection I never got as a child; and also wanting to make the world a more open and vulnerable place, where we can be accepted for who we are in any moment, even when we are ugly and desperate and absolutely bereft. We all deserve that connection. We need it.

I hope she has some peace. We all deserve that, too.