Today has me thinking hard about grief. We have lost two beautiful people from the world over the past week, one at the beginning of his life and the other with many years behind her, both great losses. Of-course you know last week we lost the formidable, extraordinary warrior woman Sinead O’Connor, and today, the young and talented Angus Cloud from Euphoria. Both seem, if we believe what the media reports, to be weighed down heavy by a grief which eventually took them away.
Sinead losing her son eighteen months prior to her own life ending, he struggling with his own battles didn’t make it past seventeen. I can only imagine the intolerable pain losing a child would bring, I don’t know if I could survive that, Sinead did for eighteen months. But I imagine those months intolerable. Angus lost his father just weeks ago, the funeral just one week before he lost his own life. A few weeks living in the world without his best friend and father to decide that life without him was too much for him to bear. We don’t know exactly what happened yet, this is only speculation, but regardless the loss is immense. I get it. Grief can be a beast; it can be all consuming and overpowering. I have my own experience with loss and grief having lost both my parents by the time I was thirty-seven. Each death was excruciating, each time I didn’t know how to move forward. Even now at fifty-one, I wonder how to navigate this world alone, with no parent to call on for advice, for help, for money to fill the car, to watch the kids so I can work, to tell me I am doing a good job, to tell me to pull my head out of my arse when I am being self-indulgent. Just to be my parents, so I am not the grownup. I miss them. But for whatever reason, I made it through the grief, the loss and the pain. It wasn’t because I had a great support system around me, I didn’t. It wasn’t because I was a superhero, super strong or resilient. I was and am just ordinary. The thing is, in our lives, we will all experience grief, it is unavoidable, and as humans it is even worse because we know this. We know we will lose our parents, our children know they will lose us. Hopefully it works in that order, many times it doesn’t. The world was so cruel to Sinead, she struggled to exist in it because she didn’t fit into any of the boxes people kept trying to stuff her into. She tore up the picture of the Pope and was crucified yet she was right and now in death the world sends her accolades. What hypocrisy. What a pity the accolades weren’t sent while she was alive, living deep in grief. It wouldn’t have made the grief easier but maybe, just maybe she would have felt a little less alone. Angus was a star on the rise, an undoubtable talent, his performance in Euphoria was absolutely mesmerising. What a damn shame we will never see him grow, just like those before him like River Phoenix, Heath Ledger and even James Dean. We can’t look away, they steal our hearts and then they are gone. I hope they have found peace now, I hope their pain has ended but I bloody wish they were still here. I am selfish like that and I want more of them. The world needed more of them. But to anyone struggling under the weight of grief know that there are people who want more of you, we all want more of you. So stick around. Maybe that’s why I made it through grief, I wanted a little bit more of me too.
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