An abiding sense of tragedy

Sinead O'Connor, my grandmother and the suffering expected of Irish women

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”

― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“In the tradition of Irish Catholics everywhere, my dad has always done his best to completely ignore any and all mental illness. To do that while being taken on a tour of an actual psychiatric unit was challenging, but I had to hand it to him: he’d made a solid effort.”

-Fern Brady

Sinead O’Connor, who died at 56 on July 26, had a lot in common with my maternal grandmother, who died 13 years ago this month, but both would have been offended by the comparison. They were from different generations and classes, and my grandmother was a devout Catholic, whereas O’Connor broke with the church in so spectacular a fashion that it unjustly eclipsed her incredible talent in the public imagination. But they were both Irish women who lived with bipolar disorder, and despite their differences, they both came of age in a time and place that had little understanding of mental illness and little desire to accommodate it.

Catholicism, and Irish Catholicism in particular, does not tend to look at suffering in terms of alleviation. Torment is to be born nobly, which is after all one of the fastest tracks to being like Christ. This notion, or possibly coping mechanism, finds particular purchase in a place like Ireland, with its centuries of imperial occupation, its desperate poverty as the rest of western Europe industrialized, and, paradoxically, the abuses of the church after it became the Republic’s de facto ruler.

And of course, in this world, women’s suffering is particularly venerated. Catholicism is littered with women martyred for their chastity, while the Ireland of my grandmother’s and O’Connor’s youths were littered with women and girls institutionalized or exiled for their lack thereof. Not only did a good Irish Catholic woman not desire pleasure, she likewise did not desire deliverance from pain.

The moment that put O’Connor on the map—when she tore up a photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” with a shout of “fight the real enemy”—was ultimately a rejection of this ethos. A victim of abuse from a country steeped in it, she did what victims are never, ever supposed to do and literally shouted about it. And people were, of course, furious. O’Connor joined a club of women now understood as either victims or Cassandras but a contemporary target of scorn and ridicule, from Monica Lewinsky to Pamela Anderson to Anita Hill to Lorena Bobbit.

It's easy to say the public couldn’t entirely be blamed for the furious backlash to O’Connor—clerical abuse was not a widely known issue in the United States at the time, and she very deliberately made her point in a provocative way. But to excuse the public’s reaction is to excuse them for never bothering to ask the question: what must the church have done that an Irish woman would be compelled to tear up a picture of the Pope in the first place? Did they think this was a decision an Irish Catholic makes casually?

I never asked my grandmother’s opinion on Sinead O’Connor; I did not seek her opinions on things often enough in general. She was exactly the kind of person who assumes a grandmotherly role in a way that prevents an incurious child, like I was, from wondering about her inner life. I was not aware of her history of mental illness until I was an adult and she briefly voluntarily committed herself.

I didn’t have a view of her suffering, but I know that my own mother did, particularly after my grandparents’ marriage ended, and during that period, my mother was frequently forced to assume a roughly maternal role to keep the household on an even keel, a kaleidoscope of irony in light of the conservative nuclear family structure Irish Catholics claim to value so much.

I’ve never been diagnosed as bipolar and I’ve never really suspected I could be, but recently, in the throes of depression, I told my mom I’d been wishing I was dead, a feeling distinct from suicidal ideation. She told me that when she was younger, her own mother would often wake her at night to describe the same feeling, which made me feel overwhelmed with guilt (comes with the territory) but also with empathy for the deja vu she must feel, that maybe this unresolved melancholia was simply part of the bloodline if not the very ethnicity.

When my  grandmother died in 2010, it was not by her own hand, and I earnestly thank God for that. I would much rather still have her here, and have spent more time asking her about herself and her life and her feelings. If I had to guess, I’d imagine my grandmother was appalled by Sinead O’Connor’s SNL appearance, but I also wish she had found some of that same rage. I don’t consider it a failure on her part that she didn’t, but I think it would have improved her life and my mother’s. Wherever they put us when we’re gone, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine these two women, alike and unalike in equal measure, found one another and had a lot to talk about.