7 minute read
A community in grief
A community in grief
William Hayes reflects on the impact of Ashling Murphy’s murder on the community of Tullamore.
The murder of Ashling Murphy was a crime that struck a note of horror around the world. As vigils took place as far apart as Sydney and New York, her death came to signify so much about the dangers that disproportionately face women in our society.
In Tullamore these society-wide issues have been present, but for our community it has also been a time of shock and grief. Ashling was not only a national school (primary school) teacher who taught first class (P3) in a rural school just outside of the town, but she was involved in so many of the things that our community holds dear. She took part in GAA and played traditional Irish music.
One of the local head teachers put it like this: “With all that she was part of, it feels that this is more than the killing of one person, but an attack at the heart of our whole community.”
As a community, we gathered together for three vigils in different areas of the town on the Friday after her murder. I, along with the other clergy in town, led prayers at the vigil in Tullamore Town Park. As we waited for the vigil to start, we watched in awe as thousands upon thousands of people from in and around our town poured into the park. The stage was surrounded by hundreds of traditional musicians and the park was filled with the sound of their playing in the time running up to the vigil ceremony.
As candles were laid out in the park in a heart shape, flowers began to be left at the entrance to the canal, and people expressed their shock and horror at all that had happened. The sharp mix of public grief, international media attention, and the private pain of a family brought to mind the events surrounding the death of Princess Diana.
Just as at that time of international public mourning over the untimely death of a young woman, so in the mourning over the death of Ashling Murphy, there was a complex and intermingled web of grieving in which our own losses and fears were expressed. At the time of Diana’s death, a new term entered into the popular consciousness: ‘vicarious grief’. It came to refer to that bundling up of our own grief with the public mourning of someone we did not know personally.
Two decades ago that term was used to criticise the style and extent of the public grief over Diana, but vicarious grief is not something shallow, fashionable or tawdry to be distrusted or looked down upon. Wrapped up in our community and our country’s mourning for the murder of Ashling were the many losses that people up and down the country had faced during the pandemic. Alongside the grief for Ashling was the fear that parents (like me) of girls have every time their daughter is outside in a world where she is always going to be less safe than her brother.
Also wrapped up in that grief was the grief for so many other young women who have been attacked or killed. The irony that her murder took place on a stretch of the canal named after another local woman, Fiona Pender, who disappeared and was suspected murdered over two decades ago, was not lost on the local community. Just after the funeral of Ashling Murphy, the Irish President attended the first anniversary mass of Urantsetseg Tserendorj who had been murdered in Dublin the previous year.
Ashling Murphy
Zambrero Ireland
This intermingling of public grief and personal loss was felt in Tullamore Presbyterian Church the Sunday after the news of the murder. The service started late as family after family came along to share with me their own connection to Ashling or how her death had retraumatised them after their own losses and pain.
During the service we looked at John 11, the story of the raising of Lazarus. We looked at how John depicted the differing styles of grief of the two sisters. Martha comes to Jesus sad that Jesus did not heal him, but with a deep confidence that her brother will rise again on the last day. Mary’s grief appears to have anger deep within it that causes her to break tradition – initially she refuses to go out to meet Jesus as an honoured guest at the funeral. Mary’s “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” carries with it a stronger rebuke to Jesus because it is not followed by Martha’s statement of faith.
We each grieve and mourn in our different ways. Martha’s confident faith and Mary’s anger are both valid expressions of the emotions that we feel within us at the loss of a loved one. Sometimes when we mourn we move between the various stages of faith, disappointment, anger and pain. Sometimes we are a bundle of all of these things together.
While the different forms of grieving of Mary and Martha teach us that it is okay to express our grief in different ways, the weeping of Jesus shows us that even our grief is holy before God. This is important because, whether we live in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland our cultures do not deal well with the idea of grief.
We are expected to be stoic and to ‘grieve well’. Even the amount of time that we are allowed to grieve is remarkably short in our society. If you are not putting your best foot forward within a couple of months of a severe loss then people begin to worry about you. This is all so unnatural and so unhealthy.
There is a huge difference between what Paul means when he tells us not to grieve like those without hope and those who would simply tell us not to grieve at all. We grieve, we mourn, it is a natural thing. Jesus did it. He wept at the graveside of a friend that only moments later he would raise from the dead.
On that Sunday in Tullamore church, just as in many parts of our community on that day and in the days since, we wept and mourned. We prayed, and we grieved. These things are holy. Jesus did them. Our grief is holy and our grief is important because it reminds us that evil in this world is senseless and wrong. It is not meant to be here. We should never expect it to be normal that women are attacked and killed so regularly.
That grief and that anger points us away from the violence and pain of this world to the kingdom of God and to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. We grieve with hope. Not just for ourselves, rising one day to be with Christ, but for this world, that it might be transformed into the kingdom of God through the redeeming work of Christ.
Please pray for our community. The world’s cameras have gone but the grieving continues and will surely be reignited with the impending trial, anniversaries and the ending of the school year. Pray for Ashling’s family, for the murderer and for his own family. Pray for the peace of Tullamore and protection for every woman out today who will be looking over her shoulder a little more and feeling much less safe than in the days before Ashling Murphy’s name became known around the world.
Rev William Hayes is minister of Tullamore Presbyterian Church.
