Jennifer Horgan: Like Oscar Wilde, Sinéad's outcast spirit will ensure she will always be loved

“I’m serious, I want all my friends and family dressed in black, and in silence. I don’t want any children and I don’t want a sit-down dinner. I don’t want any laughter or any singing. It should be sad — very, very sad. Then I’d like a tree to be planted alongside a plaque with my name.” 

I stifled my laughter. “Doesn’t it matter what age you are?” I probed. “Like, if you’re hitting 90, isn’t that a cause for celebration? Wouldn’t you like people to reflect happily on your long life?” 

“No.” Silence on the line.

My friend wants a funeral that couldn’t be more different to my own. Granted, if I die soon a celebration will be harder to manage, for my children particularly, but still — I’d like something close to one. 

I’d most certainly like children; I’d like laughter and singing and dancing. I’d like Tina Turner’s Proud Mary, alongside something a little more melancholy like Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide or The Beatles’ In My Life. No black clothes necessary. I want colour and poetry.

Sinéad O’Connor, incidentally, had her own ideas about how people should respond to death. She remembered feeling angry about people’s reaction to her mother’s death.

She recalled:

We’d never seen these people when she was alive. I was angry they hadn’t helped us. Or her. I didn’t know who half of them were. And the ones I knew made me feel angrier.

I wonder what she might make of our reaction to her own death last week?

Echoing the young Sinéad standing by her mother’s coffin, singer Morrissey says it’s all too little too late. We didn’t have the ‘guts’, he says, to defend her when she was alive.

Others emphasise how right she was all along, right about the Church, the covered up abuses, the betrayal of innocent victims in Ireland and beyond.

I’m not convinced she’d be bothered with any of it. Settling scores meant little to the woman. Even the furore after she ripped up the picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, she regarded with a cool objectivity. 

When asked if she finally felt vindicated by CBS’s Mark Kelley in 2010 she said: “I don’t think in those kind of terms. This isn’t about me or you or anybody else. It’s about the victims.” 

For that reason, I bet she’s most glad to see Ireland’s poor mental health services being highlighted in the wake of her death. It’s likely she never recovered from her son’s death, a death that is sadly repeated across Ireland: 66 young people in State care or known to social services have taken their own lives in the last 12 years.

This is what Sinéad O’Connor would want us all to talk about now. And she’d want us to never stop talking about it.

I heard of the singer’s death while in Paris. The morning after, I took my family to Père Lachaise, the most beautiful graveyard imaginable.

The conversation with my friend lingered as I watched people mill around the graves. You can’t but think of death and how we react to it as you walk those paths, the square-shouldered sentries of stone lining either side, the autumn leaves swirling about the graves, months after falling.

At the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, an irate man dressed in black shouted at a group of tourists who were chatting and taking snaps of the third biggest tourist attraction in the city.

“My God, people, this is not Disneyland,” he exclaimed in peak earnestness. “There are dead people here.” And with that, he stormed off, in poetic defence of the Lizard King.

I wondered if Jim Morrison would want his indignation. The man was notoriously anti-authority. Would he have shirked the authority of death also? Would he like the idea of people enjoying themselves at his grave?

As we turned to leave, some stung, others amused by the chastisement, my daughter pointed out "all the chewing gum". I hadn’t noticed so I ducked around to look again.

She was right — a tree in front of the grave has bamboo wrapped around its trunk and it is absolutely covered in coloured blobs of discarded gum. Disgusting? Glorious? Maybe both?

Fans have been leaving them for decades apparently. They have also destroyed two of his headstones and left graffiti and marijuana as gifts. The latest headstone to grace Morrison’s final resting place is flat-stone with the Greek inscription, “ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ,” which means “True To His Own Spirit.” 

Outcasts

Before his death, Morrison walked Père Lachaise’s alleys for hours. Above all, he wanted to see Oscar Wilde’s grave. So, we followed.

A similar story of devoted fans awaited us. Glass now encases the striking statue of a vast winged figure, erected some years ago to prevent adoring fans from kissing the stone. Animal fat left by thousands upon thousands of lipstick kisses was corroding the sculpture. Walking around it, I discovered a stubborn little collection of red, pink and purple mouths on the casing, the creases perfectly preserved.

When the glass was put in place, Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland said: “I am deeply touched that this man who had been […] hounded out of England is now adored by all his fans.” Wilde was jailed, arguably killed, for consensual homosexual acts. 

The wonderful Stephen Fry, who played the tragic writer in the eponymous 1997 film, celebrated how much people now love Wilde in death. He shared the wish that he could “wake him up for five minutes just to tell him that, then he can go back to sleep again?” 

Sadly, society is not yet entirely mature. The statue’s testicles were stolen in 1961. It is said that the cemetery manager uses them as a paperweight. I’d like to see them restored. The man was defaced enough in life and deserves nothing but respect in death.

I’m left wondering how Sinéad will be buried; as a Muslim, I presume she will be facing Mecca. I wonder how we will behave at her graveside? I imagine she would like some reverence, considering her lifelong religiosity? But how will devoted fans square that with her punk spirit? 

Will she spawn her own bubble gum/lipstick tradition? Wilde’s spirit permeated Ireland’s gay marriage referendum. Will O’Connor’s spirit someday witness improvements in Ireland’s mental health services? Let’s hope so.

Like Wilde, she will forever represent something unique and wonderful, especially for the outcasts among us, the rebels, for as Wilde’s grave reads, “Outcasts always mourn”. 

However it is we choose to mourn her, now and into the future, I am glad that in death at least, and whether she cares about it or not, Sinéad O’Connor is loved.