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A Black Christmas
There are traffic accidents over Ireland, over Europe, everyday, leading to tragedy for many families but the ones we fear most and which preoccupy our thoughts are the ones that occur closest to home.
When we heard what happened on Springfield Road on Friday night, about a car knocking down several children close to a pedestrian crossing, our first thoughts were about the condition of the children, how devastated their families would be when the news was broken, and then, what were the names of the children. West Belfast is really such a small and close-knit community that many people will be related to or know someone who knows the families concerned. In this way we are all affected.
Not that condolences and sympathy even on such a large scale can assuage the suffering of the relatives.
The death of 11-year-old Christopher Shaw last Friday night brought back memories of another Friday night back in April. We were with our friend Frank Quigley and other friends in the Roddies celebrating a fiftieth birthday when he was told that his son Rossa had been critically injured in North Belfast. In fact, 25-year-old Rossa had been knocked down and killed by car thieves just after giving his mother a birthday present and was on his way home.
What the death of children does is challenge our belief in natural justice. We raise our children in the hope that they will have more opportunities than we had. We raise them in the expectation that they will grow to experience the full potential of life and joy in youth and adulthood before they in turn slow down, move aside, and become standard-bearers of the older generation. We are appalled at things that thwart that ideal cycle because they make us feel helpless, and feeling helpless frightens us and reminds us of how small we are – or seemingly unimportant to God.
The ease with which Ian Huntley murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, disposed of their bodies, and then behaved as if he had done no wrong is horrifying. Incidents like this reinforce deep down inside us a universal fear of how casual death can be. Had the two girls went for a walk in the opposite direction, for example, they would still be alive.
Side by side inside us co-exist classic contradictions: we wait for things to get better and we wait for things to get worse; we love our fellow human beings but we are terrified of them because we know they can be evil; we can trust only what we know, we know ourselves only and we know we can’t be trusted.
Tom Waits taps into this rudimentary misanthropy in his song ‘Misery is the River of the World’ with the lyrics:
“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind
There’s nothing kind about man.”
But, of course, that’s not true either. Many risk and lay down their lives for others. Parents continually sacrifice for their children. Friends please us and make us laugh everyday and we appreciate life, are glad to be alive. We look forward to seeing the ones we love, and would travel a thousand miles to be with them. And when they pass from this world and are gone forever we pine for them to the end of our days, keeping a vivid record of them in thoughts and memories.
My favourite night is New Year’s Eve when we bid farewell to the old year and all the sadness and joy it brought us, and we welcome in the new when sad events begin to take on the status of anniversaries. Marking anniversaries is possibly a psychological way of helping us get back to life and coping with tragedy - though many people can never recover.
Every December 25th there are two Christmases: that of the child and that of the adult. Children in their innocence believe that the world revolves around them, with Santa coming all the way from Lapland just for them!
Adults know differently.
1970 was the last year that our family spent Christmas together around the table. After that one sister, then another, left to get married and set up their own homes with their own families far away. At other times it was jail, not geography that prevented us from uniting. I still have a naïve regret that we all left the nest and were never together again with the same fusion. And because of my sister’s death and father’s death two years ago (he was buried on Christmas Eve, seven weeks after Susan died) that can never be.
It is a custom here that on Christmas Day people visit the graves of their loved ones. And at the table before dinner is served we will also recall our friends who died in 2003: Rossa Quigley; our old friend and neighbour Billy McCulloch who died in May, aged 92; a close friend of my wife, Tony McAuley, the broadcaster and musician, who died from cancer in June, aged 63; and another friend, Barney Morgan from Grovetree Residents Home who died in July aged 85.
Because imprisonment was so central an experience of our community for over thirty years I also think of political prisoners and their relatives on Christmas Day.
And, of course, the death of Christopher Shaw, and the critical injuries inflicted on his 13-year-old brother Darren and his sister’s 8-year-old friend have made this the blackest Christmas in West Belfast for many years.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison