Perhaps the greatest insight of maturity (well, at least my maturity) is understanding that we ALL struggle.
To different degrees, in different ways, in varying degrees of awareness, and in varying visibility. And to different degrees of resolution.
Do any of us ever fully heal? (ask your intimates, they know best (perhaps they're the only ones who know)).
Sinead O'Connor's long deep struggle she shared so explicitly and beautifully with us is over. While we all struggle, must of us deliberately build and maintain a veneer of togetherness to protect or impress. Some of us lead with it. We're deep and active in our struggle and we grasp widely for support. Sinead's pain, struggle, and cries for help were foremost in her life and prominent in her art. Struggle, healing, setback - all in the limelight. When she lost her son two years ago, I think those paying attention knew this would be too much to bear for long.
Upon hearing the news of her passing, I think my thought was, "so, it's now." Shortly afterward I watched an early video of her in a concert in Chile. It captured the Force of Nature she could be. Bold, powerful, totally in control. A marvel. I did not grieve her then.
The raw power and vigor of youth. Perhaps all our damage has been wrought by then, the pain fresh, the understanding incomplete. And yet there is power, there is resilience. There is defiance, strength. There is still so much hope.
I did not cry for the 25-year old Sinead.
A couple of days later, I watched Sinead twenty-years older. Fifty-year old Sinead broke me.
By then we knew the young firebrand had not exorcised her demons, had not found nirvana, that she would remain haunted by her ghosts. Like all of us, her radiant intensity, the hard power of youth had softened, the weight of the years wore on her face, her manner, her bearing. Wearing the weariness of the complexity of decades.
In youth we have vigor, a burstingness of energy we can seldom contain. We radiate. Power. Possibility.
With age we lose that. Perhaps I miss that the most. The loss of the vigor leaves a void.
But, it doesn't stay empty. Radiation is a one-way thing. It's outward. It pushes. It pushes away. It's hard to sail a heart into a headwind.
The loss of "hard" makes room for "soft".
"I'm hurt and angry". In youth, the vigor of defiance - the anger - eclipses the hurt. Your heart, protective, recoils from the yell. It recognizes the pain, but in the power recognizes danger.
In maturity, the diminishment of power yields to vulnerability. We instinctively, reflexively, inescapably are drawn to vulnerability.
And, perhaps, with experience we learn that regardless of our trauma, it is not unique to "me". There are many. There is community. There is "we". A lived and practiced compassion becomes unsuppressable.
"I'm singing about me" is now understood as "I'm singing for us."
And while in 1987 we feared Sinead's pain - this unknown young firebrand was killing dragons and burning Troy. In her maturity and ours, we grieve her. We knew her, her anger was ours, her pain is ours. Her strength and resilience, especially her resilience, we wish was ours.
Her dragons kept coming, but she stood, scarred, bent, wailing, but never yielding.
May she sing with the angels. Rather than hymns of praise, she'll surely singing for justice for the hurting.