the heartbreaking power of music

A moment I will think about for some time to come.

I am sitting in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin’s city centre. A church has stood on this site since 1192, the site chosen in part because of its location next to a holy well. I like that there is this faint pagan tie to this place, it feels apt for what is to come.

Outside the sky is a fierce blue, it is a startlingly hot day. Opposite the cathedral a few thousand people have gathered in a park. Inside, another thousand or more have gathered. We are all here for the funeral service of a well-know Irish musician who has died suddenly in a motor bike accident out near Strawberry beds in Dublin, leaving behind his young son, his wife, five siblings and thousands of friends and fans. It has been a difficult week. News of his death hit me and my husband surprisingly hard. My husband had toured with him in the early years of his band, had recorded a charity album with him, had played with him a few times in various guises. I’d only met him perhaps three times. But still, with the news of his death we both felt that strange, awful axis shift, that void opening up. The physical punch in the gut, the disbelief. That sense that somehow the world has tilted a little, or that you are now seeing everything through a different lens, pulled to a different focus.

The musician died on a Tuesday morning at approximately 4:30am. At approximately 2:30pm two days later, on the Thursday, marked two years since the sudden, accidental death of my brother-in-law. This surely had much to do with how visceral and shocking the death of the musician felt. Even though we were so much further removed from the centre of the bomb-blast of this death, the shock waves were ones we knew well.

There was also the music. The musician’s voice had been the soundtrack to my teens and twenties, so many important memories formed around his art. I’d written to the same piece of music of his on a loop for over twenty years.

I first heard his band playing at a gig in the Black Box in Dublin in the late 1990s, snuck in with two older friends. It was so loud, so insane - the crowd was a seething single mass, sweat fell on me from the ceiling. I less heard the music than was filled with it. With the rawness and sheer force of his performance the musician was transporting himself and all of us with him to somewhere else, tapping into a part of me I didn’t even know was there, but which I recognised as somewhere very, very important. Walking out of the venue, soaked with sweat, I felt altered.

The next summer word spread of a secret gig in the sand dunes of the wide sweep of coastline known as Brittas Bay. How word spread, I don’t know, this was before mobile phones, but I took my mum’s 1982 Ford Fiesta and crammed as many of us as would fit and we drove the hour down to Brittas and the crept along the coast with the windows down following the bass wafting over the dunes, parking and then walking through the dark towards the dull thud of drums until we found an explosion of people on an amphitheatre slope of sand, lit by a fire and the stars. The musician sang that night and again it opened something in me a little bit more.

Decades later I will discover that my husband was there, playing that night too. I love to think of that — how our paths crossed and crossed until it was time for us to lock eyes for good.

So this death, then, was also tied to all of this, to the sense that this wilder, freer, more innocent, more possible time that he symbolised, was at an end. The life ahead of me back then, the world we moved through, a simpler time.

But here in this music is also where the beauty lies. And where the moment I will think about for a long time to come occurs.

The service was attended by over 1,000 people within the church, a large crowd gathered to watch on screens outside, and was also broadcast live on RTÉ television, Ireland’s national broadcaster. The day before over 11,000 people had attended the musician’s wake at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, paying their respects as traditional Irish music was played by friends.

The service began as many religious services do, a clergyman speaking to the congregation, hymns, prayers read out by family members. The ritual of it settling us all a little.

And then the music began.

Music that, little by little, broke me open even more.

(*I think you need to double click on this first link to listen, the only version I seem to be able to include here is this one from tiktok)

What this music, this art, did to us all. It opened us all to our grief, the grief for this dear musician who had died. But also beyond that, too. The thousands upon thousands across the world watching on screens, feeling more grief than they expected for this loss, feeling loss flooding in that had been pressed down, tucked away, that hadn’t had a way to surface. Feeling held in that by the most exquisite notes, sung and played with great love for a friend.

That feeling, my god, it is something. Heavy and hard and real and beautiful and tender and raw and close and devastating and alive.

As the musician’s casket was lifted onto his loved ones shoulders to carry him on his final journey, a wreath of willow, holly, yarrow, berries, apples and more, harvested by those who loved him adorning the top, thirty or more musicians stood around him and sang him on his way. When you watch the footage of this scene what you see is a gathering, a building of something quite extraordinary, a coming together into a way of feeling and processing grief that holds one another, allows the emotion to transmute into something more. Look at the grief on faces that turns to smiles, look at how everyone stands closer as the music builds, how they move their bodies, opens their mouths, allow sound, music, grief and love to travel with and through them. Look at the shaft of light that falls fiddle player Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s body as he plays towards the end.

And then there was the moment I will think about for a long, long time to come. What the video below does not show is the wave that moved through the congregation as this keening song progressed. There was a moment where all of us together as one stood up from our pews, surged forwards towards the music and joined them, wrapping arms across shoulders and singing as loud as we could. For a moment, it was impossible to parse the heavy grief from a deep love that felt close to a heartbreaking joy. I would never want for this musician to have died, or for his wife and son to have to feel the devastating loss they now carry, I would never want for my brother-in-law to have so suddenly left behind his own dear small children and wife, but that feeling, that communal heartbreak, that coming together and allowing the pain and channelling it though song … I can’t explain it - it felt like a terrible ending, but also within it the possibility of a new beginning.

Here is the video of that final song, which includes footage of a casket being carried out of a church.

le grá,