The

The Hi everybody, it's Naomi here.

I think like a lot of people, I've spent the last day or so just really reeling from the news of the death of Sheneid O'Connor, who meant so much to so many people, and has gone at the

far too young age of 56.

I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts and a little bit about who she was.

I found out more about her myself due to a strange quirk, I guess, of my employment history,

which was at one point about a decade ago.

I was working the night shift of a French news agency in London, and I was given the task of updating

the obituaries of famous people. Now, this might sound quite macabre, but news organizations

often have obituaries prepared on file in advance for many famous people, everybody from monarchs to presidents.

And that's so that the obituaries can be ready already when people do die. And I made the

decision to write the obituary in advance for Chenate O'Connor.

And the reason why I wanted to do that was because I wanted to take the responsibility of paying tribute to her.

I wanted someone to do that who would take the task seriously and wouldn't understand what she meant as a person.

In general, when I'm writing obituaries, which I've done a good few times in my job,

I approach it like I'm putting together a biography of a person, like I'm their biographer, like I'm going to write a book.

I read everything that they've written that I can get my hands on, I watch any interview they've given, try to immerse myself in their life's work, try to understand who they were as a person

and get to know them if I haven't met them in person as much as I can through the record that

they've left. And that's what I did with Sheenade. And it was in that way. By reading the archive

of every interview that she'd ever given at that point, I learned that Sheenaid O'Connor had been

incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry as a teenager, in a place called Angrianon.

And she was confined there alongside old ladies who had been there all their lives, and the girl in the bed next to her was a young black woman whose baby was taken away from her against her

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