Just Like U Said It Would B
Reflecting on the loss of two stars.
I went to a tribute concert for Sinead O Connor this week at the City Winery and got to sit with her discography and reflect on her rebel spirit over the course of the night as different guests took the stage to cover her songs including Amanda Palmer and one of my all-time favorite musicians and collaborators Bilal.
Bilal’s rendition of Just How You Said It Would B was eerie and brought back feelings I had the same week of her death.
And there's talk in the houses
And people dancing in rings
Ah, will you close my eyes, babe?
I can see most everything
I wrote a reflection shortly after Sinead’s death in July and felt compelled to return to it this week.
Sinead passed the same week as a young actor called Angus Cloud, who played Fez from the show Euphoria.
He lost his Father in May and died of an accidental overdose soon after.
Autopsies found Fentanyl.
Sinead lost her son a year prior to her own death and wrote on July 17 that she’d ‘been living as undead night creature since.’
Yesterday an article appeared in the NY Times regarding the shooter in Maine and how he had made numerous claims that he felt dangerous to himself and to others or what sounded to me like ‘cries for help’.
Matthew Perry died this week unresponsive in a bath.
I remember when Whitney also died this way.
I remember Amy. My first true kindred musical spirit.
I remember Mac Miller.
In moments like these I am struck with many ‘what ifs.’
I question my own role as part of a culture that often fails to protect people in times when they need it most. I am haunted by these cries for help we hear about after celebrities die. News of their ongoing struggles with mental health and addiction.
There is no closure to death in this life, no neat bow that helps us process it all in a linear way and make sentimental sense of it, but it feels like it honors those we’ve lost to reflect on what their deaths also say about us.
To question the impact of fame, celebrity, attention, grief and trauma and what it has done to so many we love in the entertainment industries.
To think about what weights they were carrying.
What it took for them to do what they did.
To ask ourselves if we are listening, closely enough.
Or are we caught up in the same frenzy that it made it impossible for them to keep going?
To take time to live with the words they said…. Somehow they hit different now.
I can see too many mouths open
Too many eyes closed, it's closed
Not enough minds open
I can’t help but sense the prophetic in songs like this one. There’s a quiet knowing, a confidence in a coming peace… and an eerie admission that maybe sometimes we see the worst coming and don’t act soon enough.
When I lay down my head
At the end of my day
Nothing would
Nothing would please me better
Than I find that you're there
Just like you said it would be
Just like you said it would be
Just like you said it would be
Just like you said it would be
We talk a lot about life but we must often talk about death.
My hearts is heavy today as I struggle to make sense of how much death is all around us and how we keep feeding into the systems that make them all the more likely. There is no greater reckoning than death to forces our eyes open and our hearts into soft submission. May we honor those gone by letting them speak truth into the lives we have left.
Here are those words from a week of grieving in July of this year.
The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance
As I sit here, reflecting on the death of Sinead O-Connor and Angus Cloud, I am struck by how many times they cried for help. I am struck by how candid they both have been about their struggles.
It is scary at the edge, and they both likely lived there many times of their life.
Both took their lives after the death of a loved one. Sinead’s son. Angus’s Father.
Perhaps fearful that they cannot go on without them.
Both longing for the transcendent.
One reaches for chemicals, one for religion.
Did fear of this life (as they knew it) lead them to believe the next life is worth more than this wretched one? They might be right. Things feel grim and disconnected and hedonistic and divided. Sometimes the only things getting you through are certain people. And then, suddenly, they’re gone?
How can we continue to live without the foundation they provided?
Floating.
Spiritual longing and wanderlust.
The adventurous minds who paint our stories in colour.
The artist.
The shaman.
We lift them up.
But now they are unable to root.
The dancer without gravity.
The addict with a limitless stash.
The fire set rampant across the vast forest.
Without stopping, it spreads and permeates and intensifies and calcifies.
And eventually, the pain of staying begins to outweigh whatever scary, unknown, potentially infinite possibility exists on the other side of death.
I sit here, reflecting on the transitions and the magnetic sparks of these two human beings. I feel their spirits slowly detach and let go of this earth, I feel them almost slide into the next world, I lift thanks, for the ways Sinead and Angus pushed us to see ourselves.
What are we doing when our youth are crying for help? Are we listening?
What are doing when singers, rappers and musicians are dying over and over again to the same causes?
Why are we feeding fame and idol worship culture more than ever when we are becoming so devastatingly cognizant of how deeply it is wounding those who seek it? It’s like no one ever really told them what they were signing up for.
You work and work and work and feed and feed and feed those hungry voices but they never get satiated, they never tire, they just get hungrier.
Sinead and Angus are everywhere now, just like my friend Emily. I spend a lot of time with her now, maybe more than I did when she was alive, because now I sense her boundless light in a subtle glow all around me. There are things she can show me only now that she’s gone…. in the wide open spaces she occupies, in the air and silence after the music stops. She needed to paint with a bigger brush. I just pray I keep listening for the whispers when they appear like a tickle in my throat.
Till next time,
And thank you for your words, for drawing from that deep well and casting out.
Many of us dance with death but it isn't a kind partner when we ask it to come early.
It doesn't flirt it steals. It doesn't play pretty it plays dirty.
As someone who tried to take my life as a teen and who would have missed so many grand moments had I achieved that pathetic goal, I would go back to my young self and shout that it is better to rage - rage against the dying of the light. Referencing the poet Seamus Heaney of course.
But it is better to run to the shore, to throw stones, to call to the Goddess or whoever is listening or not listening, to sob, to swear - don't harm others or your self, but do shout about your pain, do release it to nature, howl in a storm and weep in the lull.
I would tell and I still my dancing with death self to come back from the edge. To find peace beyond despair. To find the light under the darkness deep in that well.
I had every right to be sad and angry in my loss and despair but I needed to find another way and I have since and we all must do this. We must be brave and curious. Call any helpline.
I urge others to so. Call any help line.
And give help.
As someone who has kept others from that brink by messaging, coaching, and reminding them about every good point in themselves and reminding them to remind themselves, I feel that taking a massive side step that will cause untold distress is not a step that should be taken.
And I do know it is hard to live with loss, harder than any physical pain.
Recently when someone very dear to me expressed that they were toying with opting out, I snapped. Perhaps because I could so easily go there. But we must - we must stand together. I told them we must all be curious and courageous.
We must develop courage and curiosity.
For every suicide there is another. For everyone who can't cope there is another who can't cope. We must turn that around. We can muster the courage and curiousity to survive the terrible and tame our demons and keep them at bay.
I do some tried and true answers for those who read this and want out. Early on, when you start feeling low, right down ten things you like about yourself. Do it. Write them down. Do the same for someone you suspect is feeling low. Write ten things you like about them and put those ten things in front of them. Put yours in front of you. Keep them there.
Make this an everyday task.
If you can't find ten things you like about you after really giving it a proper go, then ask someone else to write five things they like about you. Ask someone else. It takes courage to opt in rather than out.
Other tricks that work, which do take courage and curiousity are to: volunteer, care, be an activist against injustice, write a song, a poem, a novel. Or use your courage to continue in that mundane job where you might just be shifting someone else in a good direction. Go to the supermarket and stand behind the checkout counter. Be the smiling face that cheers twenty sad customers.
One of my good friends does that. And that is massive.
When all else fails when you have tried friends and they have their own problems they want you to solve refer them to a helpline and call one yourself. Call a helpline. Lifeline. Samaritans. Any helping group. There are people out there, strangers even, who want you in this world. Who will love you. And there are so many coming your way.
I love Sinead for her fight and I strongly feel more people should have stood with her when she fought that good fight.It is her fighting voice I hear now. I love her to this day and always will. So I am not diminishing those good souls who were struck so hard.
It is so hard when rock hits and then another. The pain is crippling. I do know from experience, from the loss of my baby, from the loss of my father at a young age, from my own griefs, disabilities and illnesses. This year I wrote a novel called The Seasonwife. It still hasn't been a great year but I will not let others down by bowing out. My historical novel is about survival and friendship. About trying to find the right path through wrong events.
A reminder to anyone in despair reading this: if all else fails call a helpline. Go to a doctor or hospital. And write down ten things you like about you. There is a path, not a straight one, a crooked path. Be curious about yourself. Step back and watch your ride.
A dear therapist told someone young this, 'I can't promise you it will be better out there, I can't.'
He told this young person that they might feel the same suffering only without a body so give this life full chance. Embrace it with all its pain and don't rain pain on others.
Because the spirit ride out on that tide isn't easy when we take before its rhythm.
Many years ago I kind of accidentally went along with friends to an evening with a spiritualist. The spirtiualist picked me out and I had dreaded that. I have this spiritual way about me that others see and which I try to ignore.
The spiritualist who picked me out described perfectly a spirit beside me, a former dear conflicted lover and friend I had loved dearly who had gone tragically and whose attempt to end their suffering brought so much suffering. The spiritualist said my lost lover didn't have it easy for a long time, it was a very long time before he came to peace.
Watching those we have left suffer agonies might seem like sweet revenge to some but there are no guarantees that the truly horrible people will suffer our loss at all. Instead, he reality of knowing we have brought suffering and despair to so many could be sheer torture of the soul
I don't know but that is it, we don't and as long as we don't know we must admit that the short cut is not the answer to ending suffering. It may well not be so.
As the friend of a mother who lost a daughter this week to the big S I have to say that we have to stop this flirtation with death because she isn't our partner, not yet. Bide our time, for the ancestors and other world wanderers will gather us when we wait for the tide to come in and out.
In the meantime there is so much more we can do to help others. Look inside but look outside too. At the sky, the birds, the sea, the grass, the tiny insect pressing onwards.
We can reach in but we must also reach out. Helping ourselves AND others can save us.
Hello Kimbra. I am just loving all of your emails. I'm getting caught up with them today. I really love your mind Kimbra. You are so brilliant and gifted. Whenever I read anything you write or see some of the things that you do, it's such an enlightening, and usually comes with an epifany or two. I know that's just crazy, but it will certainly is what it is. Anyways I just wanted to say to you how much I like how you said you are probably spending more time with your friend Em, now, than you were before she passed. I like how you still enjoy to acknowledge her presense. I have a friendly gohst or two as well for three years now. I'm always by myself but I never really feel alone. I think this is my first comment on your Substack. Yay! I finally have a chance to participate, learn and show you some love and support. I'll be reading all of the emails that you have sent so far since you've started your sub stack. I'm really glad to finally be here. I really look forward to everything. And I look forward to meeting some good people here. Hello everyone!👋😉