Healing Series: Grief and Creativity

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Day Six

Healing Series: Grief and Creativity

“No one gets to tell you what and how you should heal.” ~Jo Anna Dane

There was a time when I thought that if I grieved hard enough, cried long enough, and immersed myself in the pain, I would never have to grieve the loss of a loved one again. No one in my household talked about grief or any feelings that would make people uncomfortable. What did I know about how to be with grief?

Grief is still a taboo topic with an expectation of a time limit.

Grief comes in small and large moments. There is anticipatory grief when a loved one has a chronic life-threatening illness and you know their life span means an early death, you just don’t know when. There is chronic grief when a person is hit with one tragic loss after another and delayed grief when there isn’t the time or space to feel it all and feeling it all may break a person’s heart.

A pandemic, house fire, burglary, health challenge, end of a relationship are all examples of when there is grief.

Leaving a job where you care about people and moving to another job that you are excited about is a mixed bag of grief and joy. Claiming a part of yourself that has been buried or unexpressed, means you let go of another part of yourself and there is grief.

In recent years, #metoo, #timesup, #blacklivesmatter are some of the movements that have awakened suppressed memories that were never grieved. With conversations about gaslighting and how unacceptable power-over behaviors and abuse were normalized, and people had learned to accept and bury the feelings.

Grief may appear with feelings of regret, longing, frustration.

Grief is part of healing, and it can be part of the underlying chaos in creativity.

A story of loss

When I was a young mother with a baby and a toddler, I asked my mother about grieving the death of her son (my brother) who had died from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) in 1961. Her response, “He was dead. He was gone, that was it.”

After getting over my immediate shock at what felt like death itself, I sat there dumbfounded. He was dead, he was gone…