Sinéad O'Connor has a way of showing up when she's needed.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months listening to and reading about Sinéad O'Connor. I grew up hearing her music; my dad’s been a fan of hers since he was my age, in the Chicago punk scene in the 80s when The Lion and the Cobra first came out. (My dad is the coolest person I know). I’d never really paid attention, the way you do when you've been hearing something your whole life. The Nothing Compares 2 U video still transports me back to being four years old; I vividly remember watching it play on our big, chunky old Mac, determined not to miss the exact moment the tear fell. My parents told me more recently about burning Feel So Different onto tapes, back in the day; I put it on on a road trip and they exclaimed delightedly over one of their old favorite songs. Every time I hear it it feels like home. But it was Christmas Eve in 2023 when I stumbled over Drink Before the War.

The 24th of December is my grandpa's birthday. He'd passed away that same year. So had Sinéad. I was sitting there, bundled in a Ravenclaw scarf my cousin had just brought me (he apparently remembers my mortifyingly dramatic Harry Potter phase of a decade ago), having drunk way too much hot chai and attempting to power through the most intense writing session I'd attempted thus far. I love browsing music while I’m working on my computer, often trying new, unfamiliar tracks and adding slowly to my monstrously long time-capsule playlists when I find something I like. I clicked randomly on Drink Before the War that afternoon, recalling vaguely that Sinéad O’Connor had an incredible voice and thinking about the impact it'd had on my dad when the news of her death broke. He... doesn't tend to have much of a reaction to these things, usually, but he talked about it for days after Sinéad passed. Mainly he said that he missed her, that he felt for her, how keenly it felt that someone was gone.

My mind was blown. I had it on repeat for the rest of the day.

At the end of last year, I found myself in a situation where some of my biggest deeply-buried fears were brought rather unceremoniously to my attention. It was a crossroads, of sorts, a point where I knew what decision I was making but was faced with doubt and questions from almost every angle. Everywhere I turned. I had to come to terms with the idea that the cost of being uncompromisingly myself might potentially be loneliness. That no matter how much I loved people, and they loved me, they might never understand me.

(Maybe they do. I believe that someone does, that some people do. But it was the possibility, really, that had to be dealt with).

That was about when I came across Sinéad's performance at the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, in 1992.

I've watched it more times than I can count. It still fills me with an emotion I can't quite and haven't really tried to explain. She was so young. Sinéad in blue, surrounded and yet a lonely figure on that stage. That bald-headed girl, the look in her eye and the lift of her chin. The noise. Her sheer, blazing defiance, against what must have felt then like the entire world. She wasn't untouchable, or invulnerable. The drastic opposite. She was staggeringly beautiful.

Listening to Sinéad doesn't bring me comfort nearly as often as it does courage. (Listening to her talk sometimes brings comfort, I have to admit, perhaps because I grew up in a tattoo shop—surrounded by a bunch of rough-talking, scary-looking, leather-clad sweethearts—and listening to her merrily cussing away in that incongruously grumpy old-lady voice of her better, later years sounds like home). I have never in my life seen anyone be so fucking BRAVE. I don't understand how so much blinding courage could fit into one tiny person.

At some point I will gather the necessary courage and read her memoir in full, because I know it will wreck me. In the meantime, I've been chewing through old interviews, articles, albums.

She was hilarious. She was a mess. She was savage. A little frightening. She kept on and on doing the goddamn best she could. She was treated like shit. She was so kind to so many random people who never forgot it. She was pissed the hell off. She was HERSELF, through it all; undeniably, unapologetically, unrelentingly herself. She was just another person.

What I find most remarkable, beyond the impact she's had on me personally, is how drastically different articles written before and after her death are in tone. There has been an explosive outpouring of love for her since she's been gone. While she was here, there were lovely articles written and interviews given, among this sea of dismissive, demeaning, condescending rhetoric. I read an article by the Guardian today, from 2012, where the journalist asked her if people ever tell her she's brave.

Sinéad said, incredulously: No?

(She spoke in that same interview about being treated like she's crazy everywhere she goes. An interview from around the same time is the only time I've ever seen Graham Norton be something of an asshole.)

The biggest thing I think I've learned about Sinéad is that you have to listen to her. Not only to her voice—to her. To what she had to say. She filtered nothing; she's not always easy to hear, but she was almost always right—and what she had to say is so important. She never stayed quiet, not when it would have been easier. She always said she doesn't make sense when she's talking but she does, she does—you just have to listen for it. To pay attention.

She deserved so much more grace and respect and dignity than she got. I don't care that she was a mess. The way she was treated throughout her life says a lot about our world, I think. Our society. She was a trailblazer and a revolutionary; condemned for daring to speak truths society was afraid to hear and sneered at for her honesty, dismissed in her suffering. Sinéad O'Connor had and has so much to teach us about everything humanity is and can be; the best and the worst of us.

So many of the articles I've read since she's been gone, each of them threaded through with this deep-seated grief, come down to the same question I did. Did she know how much she was loved?

No one knows.

She said, though, that she doesn't regret a damn thing. She said, smilingly, in an interview from early 2020, that she has suffered, but that she's not suffering any more. A year later, on the Irish Times’ Women’s Podcast, she was asked if she was relieved that people were finally sitting up and paying attention to what she'd been saying all this time. She said.... No? The point was never what people thought.

She spoke consistently and continually about the importance of solidarity, amplification. Dialogue. She rejected and denounced shame in all its forms, refusing to be silenced in pain and in joy alike. She spoke, towards the end of her life, about how she’d learned to accept the darker parts of herself, to “invite them in for tea.” She told the Washington Post, upon her short-lived return to the road (before the pandemic interrupted the tour), about living with immense pain, as well as joy. That she loved her life, there on the other side of it all. Her family. She spent a portion of her later years in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, knitting and drinking too-sweet coffee and watching detective shows. Folks who lived nearby got to know her as a person, not a celebrity, and became fiercely protective of her privacy.

She spoke when she was young about fearing death, grappling with mortality. In her fifties, she was working towards qualifications in palliative care. She explained that she wanted to help people be less afraid.

She was the definition of badass. She was beautiful. She was courageous and resilient and seems to have had a love for the dirtiest jokes and worst puns known to man. Her life breaks my heart. She was unapologetically herself, her whole life. She was condemned, belittled, dismissed, lauded, admired, attacked, scorned, and respected for it, by turns.

She’s gone. Whether or not she is acknowledged and heeded as she deserved to be, whether she is admired or appreciated or respected or heard—none of it makes much of a difference to her any more.

But it might still to us.

I had a dream, once, where Sinéad O’Connor was sitting on our couch at home, a friend of the family, telling me something about fear. Try as I might, I can't remember what it was. But I remember how it felt. The understanding that fear is not ever something I need fear.

There is often a cost to beautiful things. Courage, I suppose, is the willingness to pay it, for the sake of something that matters. Sinéad paid dearly for daring to be herself. What, though, would have been the cost of compromise?

If nothing else, this world would have been robbed of something beautiful.

It matters. It matters to me. It matters to so much more than me.

Whatever it may bring / I will live by my own policy / I will sleep with a clear conscience / I will sleep in peace.

It has been said that Sinéad O'Connor had a way of showing up when she was needed.

I think that’s still true.