Sinéad O'Connor had, by the time of her death, eschewed her name and an additional one, as she traveled through a world that celebrates narcissism and which treats mental disturbance as self-expression.
Her cause of death has not been revealed yet, but if it turns out not to be suicide, I'll be amazed.
O'Connor is going to be celebrated as a musical genius and a cultural beacon. I've listened very little to her music, which I don't care for at all, but what she really was, was a really screwed up personality that had been crying for help in a world that instead just urges "self-expression". In a way, although their personalities and music, etc., were very different, she's the Irish Michael Jackson, the American pop artist who went from fame to weirdness to an early death. The public is unlikely to turn on O'Connor, however, as unlike Jackson who did a deep dive into cultural weirdness, O'Connor did a deep dive into rejecting Western Culture, and the cutting edge of Western Culture loves rejecting Western Culture, making our culture unique in that fashion.
Her name was taken from Sinéad de Valera, the wife of the Irish revolutionary leader and the mother of her attending physician. Her parents divorced, which was unusual for Irish Catholic couples and her father, at least, remarried and moved to the United States. That shows fairly clearly her family had fractured. She lived with her father and stepmother for a time and then returned to Ireland, by which time she'd take up shoplifting and ended up in the Magdaline Asylum, which, like most things in Ireland at the time and many things now, was run by a Catholic religious order. She actually did very well there developing her talents, but not too surprisingly chaffed under the discipline.
A lot of O'Connor's musical career was used to turn attention on herself, which has proven in the post Madonna music world to be a good vehicle towards success. Early on, in 1992, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a photograph of St. Pope John Paul II ostensibly in protest of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, but which is more symbolic of the childish Irish temper tantrums that were just then starting to really develop. The act was so shocking at the time that even Madonna criticized it.
By that time she'd already identified as a lesbian, when that was shocking, although she later retreated from that claim. At some point in the 1990s she was ordained by the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is not in communion with Rome, an apparent "Independent Catholic Church" which is in no way in communion with Rome. She announced at that time that she wanted to be known as Mother Bernadette Mary.
In 2018, she converted to Islam, an ironic but perhaps predictable conversion as it is somewhat shocking for somebody who claimed earlier to be retaining Catholic beliefs. The irony, of course, is not only that she was Irish and self-proclaimed type of Catholic, but joining a religion that is generally hostile to female equality. Following that, she became a critic of Christian and Jewish theologians and called non Muslims "disgusting", from which she also retreated.
She was married at least once, and had four children, one of whom recently committed suicide.
The problem with being shocking and in despair is that the attention you get from being shocking is pretty temporary, and so goes the relief as well.
O'Connor stands out in the end as somebody who needed help and didn't get it. There are a lot of people in that category. With a strong-willed personality, and her world set upside down early on, she might not have accepted the help anyway had it really been offered. But celebrating the public descent of a tortured soul isn't really doing her a retroactive justice, and it didn't help while she lived.
She also stands, however, for something additional. Jackson stood for a long held American negative trait of rising people to great heights based on something superficial, and then destroying them. O'Connor, however, stands for the destruction of Western Society following World War Two, but in a time delayed way as she was Irish, and Ireland's entry into modern Western Society was delayed by at least 40 years. Prior to the Second World War a person's departure from the culture would not have been openly celebrated even if known, and it would have been somewhat arrested so that the individual self-destruction was less likely to be so open. And rescue from that destruction was a real possibility, with individuals such as C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Whitaker Chambers providing diverse examples of the same. Following 1968, however, hope for rescue started to become fleeting and open attack on the culture became a liberal virtue.
Now that she has died, she'll be celebrated and her many strange paths and failings turned into personal triumphs. In the end, however, it's clear she was grasping for the existential and metaphysical in a world that is hostile to both and would prefer to find all expression in as self-centered. Her conversion to Islam, which is openly hostile to those concepts, probably best expressed that desperate search, as misguided as the path she took was.
That's the modern way, however.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon her.
May she rest in peace.
