It is hard to lose our heroes.
When I got the news that David Bowie had died, I had a powerful and immediate somatic response to that news. I started to shake. It surprised me. I would never have guessed that I’d respond in that way.
Bowie… He’d been in my life for so long. Since I was a very young teen. Since Labyrinth and Let’s Dance. And over the past few years before his death, I had taken a deep dive into his entire catalogue. It was practically the only water I was swimming in when I wasn’t teaching and using other sorts of music.
At one point when Craig and I were very first dating, we were in my car so Bowie was playing. As always. And he finally said, Um… could we listen to something else? We did but as soon as he wasn’t in the car, I changed it back. Over time, I got a little less obsessed but he still remains profoundly important to me. As I sit here writing, there’s a print of his many faces right above my computer.
But Sinead…
When I saw the news she had died, I just went numb. No response. I’m still a bit in that place. It feels unreal and simultaneously, somehow, awfully… inevitable.
I do not remember the moment Sinead entered my life. She felt like air… like she’d always been there until I started to consciously breathe in this life and finally noticed that she’d always been there.
All through college, she was there. I dreamed of shaving my head one day, as I’m sure so many did. It said so much … I will not be what you want and need me to be. I will just be ME.
I finally spent two years with a shaved head, as many of you know, and the second all of my hair was off, I looked in the mirror at the stylist’s and said, “Oh! THERE I AM!”
Last night at the end of class, we played and moved to Mandinka. I couldn’t really move. But I wasn’t really feeling much.
One thing I have been able to do is sing. Which is another thing that has taken me completely by surprise.
When I first started singing lessons and even as recent as a month ago, I tried some of her songs but couldn’t get there.
Yesterday, I put this on and something inside my energetic throat just OPENED.
I’m rambling a bit…
Because I still have not been able to find words. So much of Sinead reflects Gen X back to itself.
The seeking. The anger. The need for something more. The need for the world to just be different… better.
The sense of something being lost and we don’t know what it is so we certainly can’t find it.
The need … the primal need … to be heard and to be seen for ourselves.
Sinead was no victim. There are too many narratives about her being constructed that way. She was powerful and inner directed and fierce. She lived her beliefs. She tried, oh, how she tried.
Right now, the thing I think I can do in honor of her is to keep on with that trying. To not allow my despair to make me incapable of action. To believe with all my soul and self that better is possible. To keep going… no matter what.
And here’s another favorite.