Melanie’s Annual St. Patrick’s Day Reminder

Mar 17

*Melanie Beth Curran, The Irish American Songstress, photo by Courtney Fox*

Being Irish American is living with death. All of us carry a common sadness: someone before us had to leave Ireland. The death of that relationship swirls around us like a restless ghost. Somehow, over the generations here, many of us have lost touch with the reality of our shared history. We were the trampled-down colonized in Ireland, we were the loathed immigrant crossing the Atlantic, and we were the impure racial pariah here in America. The temptations are many in this new place: to greed, to white supremacy, to hating the poor, to rejecting the immigrants that come after us, to becoming the colonizer and the landlord ourselves.

One St. Patrick’s Day night in New Orleans, I was so drunk I had no sense of the world around my bicycle. I was hit by an SUV on St. Claude Avenue and thrown over a couple lanes of traffic. I lay in the crossroads in front of the Hi-Ho Lounge and Siberia. My eyes fluttered open. A circle of people gathered around me. I thought they were angels wearing red. They were happy to see I was conscious. I hit my head so bad that the green of their costumes inverted to red in my eyes.

I wasn’t wearing a helmet and my brain was bleeding. In the hospital they said I was likely going to die or lose a significant amount of memory. I was 20 years old. I didn’t want my life or my mind to end. I saw the tatters of my floral print dress, ripped and splattered with my blood, hanging about my limbs. At least I would die wearing green.

I want you to know that if today, Saint Patrick’s Day, you feel melancholy, sad, heavy with some inexpressible thing, you are not alone. This is the one day of the year when people of the Irish diaspora in America get to celebrate and show their heritage. The pressure to fit the effect of your ancestors’ presence into twenty-four hours makes people buckle. I used to drink to fill that void. I felt it was my responsibility to drink, you know, for Ireland. I understand now I was drinking against the Irishness trying to express itself through me.

I didn’t want to die in the New Orleans hospital. I started to fight. I did two things on my gurney. I sang every song I knew. I thought, if I can remember the lyrics to my songs, then my memory can’t go, my brain can’t kill me. Between songs, I prayed. I prayed copious Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I promised to a God I barely believed in that if I made it, I would become the best version of myself. A miracle happened. I healed and I lived.

Each Saint Patrick’s Day, I am reminded of the gift that is my life. By embracing every song and every prayer, I remain an open channel to the ones who came before me. I don’t have to fit their presence into one day of the year anymore. I hope you too can make room for the old world in the present day, for it is by doing so that Irish American can remain humble enough to love our neighbors and not become like the sick people who drove us from Ireland in the first place. Take time to grieve and remember. Live is brief and absolutely precious. If you’re Irish in America, you have a special gift and responsibility: to be a channel of love and peace and to be a voice of protection for those on the margins.