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. 

 

Grieving For Society

The Call to Be Creative

When I was swimming in grief's minestrone soup, one of the realities that helped me cope was the sameness of life outside my house. Every day I could mindlessly commute to work, do my job, come home, watch TV, sleep.

Then 9/11 happened, a few months after my wife died, and my grief was swept up into the larger grief of the world. I had no sanctuary from death. Because I didn’t have cable, even TV wasn't a refuge because of its unrelenting coverage of the terror and destruction.

When It Is the Darkest

When it is the darkest,

that is when people need to be reminded

that the dawn will come

and the sad times end.

Turlough O’Carolan