All the Ghosts a Voice Can Summon
Andreae Callanan
When my family thinks
That I’m safe in my bed
From night until morning
I am stretched at your head
Calling out to the air
With tears hot and wild
My grief for the girl
That I loved as a child
—“I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” from the Irish poem “Táim Sínte ar do Thuama,” as translated by Frank O’Connor and recorded by Sinéad O’Connor (no relation)
Last summer, I learned that a boy who I had once loved very much had died. He died by his own hand, as I had always known he would, because he was tender and permeable and the world had taken many things from him.
He wasn’t a boy when he died; he was a full-grown, middle-aged man. He wasn’t even a boy, really, when I knew him; he was seventeen, going on eighteen, when he told me he had fallen in love with me. I was sixteen, and I loved him back with an unwavering conviction. He was a boy in the “my boyfriend” sense, although he would never call himself my boyfriend. We were just together, then we were together-not-together, then not-together-but-still-kind-of-together. And then, eventually, not together at all. He broke my heart a thousand times by refusing any notion of permanence. You can’t plan a future with someone who doesn’t believe they have a future. I wanted things he didn’t know how to want, and eventually our relationship went the way of doomed young romances.
When I learned that this boy who I had once loved very much had died, I felt a sadness for his siblings and for his mother and for the friends who had stayed by him and for the partners who had tried to help him find a way to be in the world. I felt sad because he had made beautiful music, and now he wouldn’t make any more. But I didn’t know how to make myself feel the grief that other people seemed able to feel. I didn’t know where to find it.
As a kid, I was fascinated by grief. I was that kind of a child. I loved Joan Baez’s nearly operatic arrangement of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” with its gloomy speaker who spends his nights lying by the tomb of his childhood sweetheart. I grew up on Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and then obsessed over his 1991 Hamlet both featuring all-consuming grief. In my early teen years, Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply was a comfort text for me; in it, a woman named Nina (Juliet Stevenson) is unable to move on after the death of her partner Jamie (a charmingly ratty-looking Alan Rickman). In Minghella’s version of the world, the ghosts of our loved ones never really leave us; they walk alongside us, unseen, as we move through the rest of our lives. Jamie has been watching Nina grieve for him, and her pain has been too much for him to bear. He returns to Nina, takes up residence in her new flat, and embarks on a campaign—assisted by a ragtag group of ghost friends who screen classic movies in Nina’s living room—to release Nina from her despair. In a scene near the end of the film, Jamie recites lines from Pablo Neruda’s poem, “La Muerta,” stumbling through the Spanish as Nina translates aloud: “if you, beloved, my love, / if you have died, / all the leaves will fall on my breast, / it will rain on my soul all night, all day … my feet will want to march to where you are sleeping, but / I shall go on living . . .”
All these stories stand out as attempts to make meaning out of grief because, for the most part, grief isn’t something our western culture does very well—at least not the quasi-secular part of western culture I inhabit. It’s hard to find a television show that doesn’t use death as a plot device, but for the most part these fictional deaths don’t trigger any sorrow at all in the people left behind. They certainly don’t elicit the yearning grief of a Poe or a Shakespeare or a Neruda. Case in point: lighthearted British murder mysteries. I’ve been watching them for years. The popularity of such a phenomenon—the juxtaposition of “lighthearted” and “murder”—demonstrates the lengths to which we’ll go to separate ourselves from the emotional consequences of loss. There is no grief in Midsomer Murders, just death upon comically ridiculous death.
There’s not much space for grief in the real world, either, and very little time for it. In Canada, workers who have lost a spouse or a child are entitled to up to ten days of bereavement leave; employers are only required to pay you for the first three of those days, and only if you’ve been employed for three months already. Ten days feels like a very short amount of time to mourn. There is no “right” length of time to grieve, but there are limits to what’s considered normal. In 2022, the American Psychiatric Association added a condition called Prolonged Grief Disorder to the revised fifth edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5-TR). If a child is still experiencing disruptive emotions six months after the loss of a loved one, or if an adult is experiencing the same after a year (and hasn’t had a ghost appear to help them process their feelings), they can pursue diagnosis.
Informally, Prolonged Grief Disorder is referred to as “complicated grief.” But grief is always complicated, because people are complicated. We are told that everyone grieves differently; we’ve heard it a thousand times, usually to excuse someone who seems to be grieving either too effusively (uncontrollable public weeping), or not effusively enough (dry-eyed at the funeral, chipper at the office on Monday). When we want to better understand grief, we are directed toward the famed Kübler-Ross “five stages of grief” model, which suggests that everyone grieves by traversing denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, before finally arriving at acceptance. In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross presented her five-stage model of grief as experienced by patients who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Kübler-Ross’s model is catchy, but it’s been badly misinterpreted, and has since been critiqued as anecdotal and the data set as insufficient; the patients Kübler-Ross spoke to may well have experienced this grief trajectory, but the author’s methods weren’t the sort that make for a solid scientific theory. Even if Kübler-Ross’s model had been adequately rigorous, it was only ever meant to apply to people who were dying, not to the people they left behind. For the bereaved, there’s no guide.
About a month after the death of the boy who I had once loved very much, the artist Shuhada’ Sadaqat, known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, died too.
I was immediately, absolutely, palpably gutted by O’Connor’s passing. Far more gutted than made sense. Compared to many who had followed O’Connor through her career, I wasn’t any kind of a superfan. I only knew a few of her albums, really. But those few albums? I knew them by heart, even though I hadn’t listened to them in years.
I first encountered O’Connor’s music when I was a kid, although the story of how that happened seems less and less plausible as time goes by. Here’s how I remember it: At some point in the late eighties, my mother briefly joined an evangelical faith group led by a husband-and-wife team of successful portrait photographers. The church—or “fellowship,” as it called itself—didn’t have a building of its own, so the congregation met for worship in the conference room of a hotel near a shopping mall. There was a band with a saxophone player. People spoke in tongues, and were urged to tithe generously on the promise that whatever they gave to the fellowship would be returned to them tenfold.
My mother was, and remains, a lapsed Catholic, so this was the first exposure to religion I’d ever had outside of a school prayer setting. My elementary education had been of a more or less Anglican bent. This was nothing like that. School assemblies, even the ones where our choir had sung The Lord’s Prayer over our teacher’s thunderous piano accompaniment, hadn’t prepared me for the startling urgency of people leaping up from their stackable chairs with their arms flung open to the heavens, or swaying in trances while mumbling syllables of a language that sounded made up but that I was supposed to believe wasn’t. I had no framework for making a joyful noise unto the Lord, with or without saxophone back-up.
Most weeks, for some portion of the service, my younger sister and I would be sent along with any other kids who were in attendance to what was called “children’s church” in an adjoining breakout room. I don’t remember much of what happened there, aside from some vague exposure to Bible stories, possibly with corresponding colouring sheets. I do remember playing “statues” once, so maybe this was more of a babysitting arrangement than anything pedagogical. I remember the “teachers” as being much older than I was, although they were probably only teenagers. I have no idea how committed they were to the faith they were supposed to be instilling in us.
Here’s where it gets really weird. One week, one of the teachers, who I had always thought was pretty cool, started chatting with me. I was a fairly quiet, solitary kid, so this sort of thing happened a lot; I didn’t engage with my peers, so teachers would try to suss out what was going on, and make sure I was merely shy and not a kid who warranted concern. During this conversation, the teacher asked me what kind of music I liked. I don’t remember liking any music at that age, so I can’t imagine what I would have answered, or if I answered at all. Then, she asked me if I had ever heard of a singer named Sinéad O’Connor. I said that I hadn’t. She said that she thought I would like her, and then gave me a cassette of The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor’s debut album, to keep.
My recollection of the acquisition of the tape makes no sense at all. Why would a teenaged church kid give a Sinéad O’Connor album—the real thing, not a copy dubbed onto a blank Maxell tape—to a sullen and taciturn eleven-year-old?
Boy, did The Lion and the Cobra scare me. O’Connor’s voice was unlike anything I had heard before. It alternated between crystalline and oceanic. When she whispered, it was like a haunting. When she shouted, she sounded like a vengeful spirit. She filled the air with a kind of anger I had never witnessed, but with which I felt such a deep and dreadful kinship that I could barely stand to listen. It was the sort of album I would play in my room at the lowest possible volume, my finger hovering over the tape deck, poised to hit “stop” if I heard footsteps in the hall. It felt intense and personal and private.
O’Connor would release her 1990 sophomore album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and become wildly famous for her cover of Prince’s song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I loved that album fiercely, too. Her albums accompanied me into junior high, and stayed with me through high school.
When the boy who I had once loved very much and I were together, we spent hours listening to music he liked. Sometimes it was music I liked too. Mostly it wasn’t. I don’t think it occurred to me to make suggestions. Knowing what music he was listening to, and when, felt like an important kind of witnessing, one that I didn’t want to influence by inserting my opinions. Sinéad O’Connor was never someone we listened to together, at least not as far as I can remember. I’ve been thankful for that, because listening to her with him in the room would have changed her meaning for me.
Instead, Sinéad O’Connor became who I listened to when things with the boy who I had once loved very much were terrible, which they often were. The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got gave me a vocabulary—of words, and also of sounds—for things I was feeling. So many songs about being hurt, and about hurting people, and about betrayal and anger and loneliness and loss and death and cell-wracking grief.
When O’Connor died, I assumed it had been suicide. She’d been open about suicidal thoughts in the past. She’d suffered enormous trauma as a child, and had been in and out of hospitals and institutions throughout her life. In her 2021 memoir Rememberings, O’Connor often describes herself as “crazy.” She details many of the private manifestations of her mental illness, and sheds light on the more public ones: the widely circulated plea for help on Facebook in 2017, the disastrous intervention by talk show host Dr. Phil, the terrible treatment that ensued. In January of 2022, O’Connor spoke about the suicide of her seventeen-year-old son, and about how desperately she wanted to follow him. Shortly after her son’s death, she was hospitalized again. Before she died in July 2023, she posted on social media once more about the agony of her loss, and about how in the wake of her son’s death she had been barely living. It seemed reasonable to conclude that her death had been a decision. It wasn’t until six months later that an official cause of death was released: not suicide. Natural causes. Pulmonary disease and asthma. Her heart simply broke. She couldn’t catch her breath.
In a recent essay in the online magazine Psyche, philosophy professor Joshua Thomas proposes a metaphor for grief to replace Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model. He sees grief as a “shattered glass.” You try to clean it up by gingerly removing the largest pieces first. You deal with what you can easily see. Then, you sweep up the rest, as best you can. No matter how thoroughly you sweep, though, tiny shards will elude you. You never know when you’ll find them under your feet, but you will, and usually when you least expect it. When you do, you have no choice but to stop what you’re doing and address this invisible thing that’s suddenly causing you so much pain.
When the boy who I had once loved very much died, I tried to make myself feel something more than, Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it. I reviewed years of memories. I spoke to a few shared friends about him. I found an old cassette of songs he’d recorded, and opened and closed the folded letter-sized sheet of track listings. All his signature doodles, his tiny, nearly illegible handwriting. When his obituary was posted, I stared at his photo for ages, trying to access an appropriate level of grief.
When Sinéad O’Connor died, I put on The Lion and the Cobra for probably the first time in twenty-five years. I whispered along to the sound of her ghost-filled voice as I swept the floors of my house. It felt ritualistic and important, somehow.
I thought I was grieving for her, and part of me was. But I was also unearthing a long-buried truth: these songs had always been my means of grieving for the boy who I had once loved very much. The reason I couldn’t muster anything like grief for him now was because I had spent so much time grieving for him when he was alive. I’d grieved for him while I listened for his voice over staticky phone lines in the middle of the night. I’d grieved for him on long walks together in the dark where we ended up standing at the edge of the harbour or on an unlit cliffside trail. When we lived in different cities, I’d grieved for him by going by myself to see his favourite bands, even bands I didn’t really like, because he loved them, and I wanted to witness them for him. I’d grieved for him while I was sitting beside him, and I’d grieved for him alone in my own room, listening to Sinéad O’Connor and crying to myself. I had been grieving for him the whole time we’d been together. I had already done it.
The boy wasn’t the person I needed to grieve for. I needed to grieve for teenaged me, who believed with her whole heart that her only purpose on earth was to make her boyfriend, who would never call himself her boyfriend, want to be alive. I needed to grieve for the girl who had never forgiven herself for failing. I needed to grieve for all the versions of me who never been given a chance to emerge, so fixated was I on this thing I thought I was supposed to do.
And then, with the help of all the ghosts Sinéad O’Connor’s voice could summon, I had to let them all go.
Andreae Callanan – Andreae Callanan is the author of Crown (Anstruther Press, 2019), and The Debt (Biblioasis, 2021). She is a past poetry editor for Riddle Fence, and the current poetry editor for Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies. She lives in St. John’s.
David Baltzer: I have been painting for more than 25 years after a mid-life career in film. I try to bring many of the ideas I loved about film into my paintings, such as a love of light and shadow, and the narrative amplifications of editing. I paint what interests me.