I haven’t been able to get Shuhada' Sadaqat out of my thoughts for the past week, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Known professionally as Sinéad O'Connor, the outpouring of grief and gratitude in the wake of her death was instantaneous, and overwhelming.

Sadly, this response feels like the kind of societal acceptance and love that might have made much of her life and career feel significantly less stressful, or as she described it, lonely. I didn’t set out to write a eulogy for Shuhada', certainly that’s already been done, and there have been much more eloquent and impassioned pieces written about her in the last few days, but I felt compelled to say something about the ways in which we view and treat those in the public eye, particularly when they die.

I've seen coverage of her life in the days following her death, uncritically quoting her detractors, describing her as incapable, or unable to pursue aspects of her career as if she were an object being buffeted around in a sea of success, grasping for things outwith her ability.

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Shuhada' knew exactly what she wanted to do and who she wanted to be, she was extremely driven not by a desire for fame or money, but for advocacy and change. Shuhada' herself said, “A lot of people say or think that tearing up the Pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a No 1 record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t care, or that she cared too much, it was that she cared in a world that didn’t, yet. She gladly and willingly sacrificed uncontroversial mass appeal at the altar of artistic integrity, saying, “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”

Had she said what she had years later, with the time and benefit of experience, once scandals had come to light and crimes been exposed, she would’ve been preaching to the choir and lauded as a voice of reason, but as Kris Kristofferson said in his song about her, Sister Sinéad, “It's askin' for trouble to stick out your neck/ In terms of a target a big silhouette / But some candles flicker and some candles fade/ And some burn as true as my sister Sinead.”

Shuhada' was publicly and unapologetically mentally ill, a fact that people tried to use against her at every turn, and something which never precluded her from discussing and advocating for those struggling. People refer to her as a “troubled soul”, a description which has never really sat right with me. Troubled feels too passive, as if she was complicit in the action, the agent of her own troubling. If Shuhada' was troubled, it was as many people are, by others, by their hatred, their prejudices and their willful misunderstanding of her words and deeds.

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Shuhada' was fiercely vocal in her support for those overlooked, ostracised and minoritised, such as people living with HIV and impacted by AIDS, the LGBTQ+ community, and people seeking asylum, to whom she dedicated her RTÉ Choice Music Prize just a few months before her death. It wasn’t just words Shuhada' was so willing to offer to those in need, as one of many stories shared demonstrated, with Toryn Caitriona Glavin said, “we got a call from her management asking could she donate her closet to us to as she was downsizing and wanted the clothes to go to trans folk in need.”

One thing that struck me in the days following her death was the number of people posting apologies, or voicing their regret as to how they treated Shuhada' in the wake of her actions hosting SNL, in which she tore up a picture of the Pope belonging to her mother, as a protest against the actions of both. In a world where silence and complicity are rewarded, Shuhada' shouted, in a world of those who could ignore and let live, she took the hard path, the thankless road of integrity and effort.

Just a week after Shuhada' made her statement while hosting SNL, Joe Pesci, then just shy of 50 years old, said he would’ve, “given her such a smack,” had he been near her at the time, and admitted he would’ve “grabbed her by the eyebrows”, to the applause of a crowd amused that a public figure had just alluded to assaulting a woman half his age. Society loves to build people, especially women, up to dizzying heights, but it loves nothing more than tearing them down again, and Shuhada' found herself in the eye of a storm right at the intersection of religion and misogyny.

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There’s something to be said for parasocial grief, when a celebrity or someone well known dies and we feel an almost disproportionate sadness at the loss of someone we never even met. That someone can have such a phenomenal impact on the lives of so many, and yet feel, as described by her friend, “full of terrible loneliness and a terrible despair,” is profoundly sad in hindsight. I think it represents such a common aspect of the human experience: the regret of not telling someone how they made us feel enough, or as many times, or with enough emphasis.

It hurts so much to lose the people we love and respect, because despite all evidence to the contrary, we still sometimes have hope that the universe is fair, and balanced, and that the people who struggle and endure with grace will see that effort rewarded at long last. This is perhaps most acutely felt when someone has such a public struggle, when the hardship they endure is done so in full view of the world, and where there seems little recourse for the kind of pain they experience.

Shuhada' had her own journey with grief, as following the death of her son she described herself as having “been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul." Many of us who have lost a loved one can resonate with this kind of bone-gnawing, all-consuming grief, and to hear someone so openly and publicly discussing the realities of life after the death of someone so close brought the kind of solidarity Shuhada' spent much of her life seeking: an easement of others’ pain through the sharing of her own.

Even in death she remains a teacher, and it is up to us to listen to and learn, once again, from a woman who spent her life determined to be heard.