Being Creative with Grief

After being batted around by grief for a time, many of us want to take this raw energy, and our new clarity about reality, and be creative with it. We want to regain a measure of control over a force that has been tossing us around for months. I don’t play a musical instrument, paint, dance, weave, or create sculptures, but I do write, and I wrote down every memory, image, insight, and story of my life with Evelyn, and shaped some of them into essays and poems.

 

We take the remnants that grief leaves us, and sew them together in a patchwork quilt with the sinews of our heart. 

 

Artists have long responded to grief by creating works of art. After his wife died, Thomas Moran painted “Pueblo at Sunset (Laguna)” and in the rich colors of the evening sky beginning to fade, we feel him saying goodbye to her. Arvo Pärt composed “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” that uses a tolling bell and heartrending strings that descend into the lower registers to share his grief. 

 

Judith Jamison danced “Cry” as an expression of dealing with loss and finding the strength to rise above. Albert György created his sculpture “Melancolie” out of copper and tin that depicts the hollowness people feel who have suffered a tragedy. The starkness of Dmitri Baltermants’ black-and-white photo “Grief” shows Russian civilians in 1942 walking through a field trying to find the bodies of family members who had been killed by the Nazis. 

 

We need to share our grief because society is scared of death and doesn’t want to talk about it, no longer knows how to comfort those who are grieving, and generally ignores the pervasive devastation that death brings. We need people to be creative:

 

- painters to visualize grief’s dark night and find images of light

- writers to verbalize the conflict in stories of courage and overcoming loss

- musicians to compose songs that express emotions too deep for words 

- dancers to remind us that the body can express grief and lead us out 

- photographers to capture the rawness of sorrow and the strength of community.

 

Each of us is creative in our own way. Choose an art form. Let it guide you in expressing and exploring your grief. Do a quick first version and step away. Listen to yourself, other people, nature. Let new images come. Revise what you have done, taking away what distracts, and adding in what sharpens what you want to say. 

 

Play with the techniques of your art. Let its craft challenge you to express your thoughts and emotions in different ways. Maybe an unexpected glint of color will show up in a painting, or a curious phrase in something you’re writing. Explore that. Use your inspiration in a second art form. Being creative with grief can open windows into something you haven’t understood before. It can also bring you joy. 

        JOY. I’ve resisted mentioning this until now because it’s one of the hardest aspects of grief to accept—feeling good about life again. There comes a time, after the death of someone we love, when we will feel happy, if only for a moment. Right now some of you are wincing. We think that feeling joy signals our turning away from our loved one, and we feel guilty about that. We feel guilty about many things in grief, but enjoying life again is one of the worst. If joy shows up on your doorstep, invite it in.

        In his notes for the fourth movement of his Symphony No. 4, Tchaikovsky said: “If within yourself you find no reasons for joy, then look at others. Go out among the people. See how they can enjoy themselves, surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to joyful feelings.”

        In the 18^thcentury, during a dark time in Ireland, the blind Celtic harpist Turlough O’Carolan was asked why he composed songs of joy in the midst of such turmoil. He said that when it is the darkest, that is when people need to be reminded that the dawn will come and the sad times end.

        Our flame still burns, my friends. Today’s darkness will not put it out.

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This post first appeared in The Grief Dialogues.