How You Carry It
On grief and creative expression
I’ve been thinking about the role of art in bereavement. It’s my instinct to turn toward literature and writing when I’m upset, but I have struggled to find elegies that feel suitable to my current grief over losing my niece. A child’s death stands out so differently from the other loved ones I’ve mourned, though there have been many untimely deaths of friends that have shocked me. Marilyn Hacker wrote,
“All elegy is public mourning, unless the poem or essay remains in the writer’s notebook, unpublished. All elegy makes temporary public figures of both the writer and the subject.”
I find myself wanting to write about my niece, and wanting to tell the world about what a wonderful person she was, and yet also wanting to keep my grief private, and erect a wall around my heart, to keep things sacred and precious and hidden.
Rather than words, I feel most called to work in a physical medium—thick finger paint, or clay, or paper-making. After my ex left me shortly before our wedding, I channeled my grief into turning our bespoke letterpress wedding invitations into new paper that I still use as stationery. It felt cathartic to make something new from my pain.
Wanting to create in order to cope with a loss feels like a natural impulse for me, even as words seem inadequate. What’s Your Grief, a wonderful website, podcast, book, and community about grieving has a webinar for only $10 on “Creative Tools for Coping with Grief” that makes me want to dig out my watercolors. Doing something physical with my feelings appeals to me right now. Even though I typically write my poems by hand, with a fountain pen in a fancy notebook, the writing process doesn’t feel tangible enough. Besides, so many others have written so well about grief, and right now, in the immediacy of this loss, I don’t feel capable of stringing together the right words. Here’s a favorite of mine from Mary Oliver:
Heavy by Mary Oliver That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said, was nowhere to be found. Then said my friend Daniel, (brave even among lions), “It’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it – books, bricks, grief – it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it when you cannot, and would not, put it down.” So I went practicing. Have you noticed? Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth? How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled – roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?
For a week now, I’ve had a horrible sinus infection—or what feels like a sinus infection. My doctor suspects it’s a physical manifestation of my grief. Emotional processing, memory, and cognition can all be effected when one is grieving, but other physical processes can become involved as well. Chest pain, fatigue, sore muscles, headaches, and digestive issues are all common, and I was surprised to learn that there’s a good deal of research on these conditions. I find it comforting that this is a common experience, and that I can love someone so much I can make myself sick with missing them.
Some of the reasons turning to creativity to cope with grief are that creativity forces engagement with something outside of yourself. Choosing to engage with something we love can be psychologically healthy for us as well. Creative engagement also forces us to problem solve, to think outside the box, which can help us practice seeing outside of our current grief. Visual art can help us give expression to our feelings when we struggle for words. It can also help us connect with others through our work, when we might not know what to say to them. But grief can also lead to writer’s block, or artist’s block, which is why it can be useful to turn to a new medium.
I have struggled to even write this newsletter, to be honest, but this week, I’m committing to getting out my watercolors and splashing around some color. I’ve always loved painting, even if/when I only paint abstracts. There’s compelling reasons why visual arts work better for therapeutic purposes, however. The area of the brain responsible for processing emotions, the amygdala, is also the area that processes imagery as well as sensory input. I came across this quote that I, of course, love:
Grieving and adjusting to loss has no quick fix: it is a long process. But art can help begin this process by opening channels through which to explore and vent the unspeakable. When we create, we give ourselves permission to examine all that is happening within our grieving bodies.
—Douglass Mitchell, therapist
It’s that open channel I celebrate in this newsletter about creativity in general, and I was delighted to read the quote about making art helping to open that channel to our own emotions. I wonder if I give myself time to paint, if my sinus infection will improve, because I will have given an outlet to my grief. Time will tell.
What I’m Reading:
This is a new section I’m including so I can do a bit of a round-up of any interesting things I’ve come across that may or may not be totally relevant to the newsletter of the day. People are always asking me to recommend books, so this seemed like a good way to do that.
This wonderful portrait of poet Ada Limón in the New York Times, where I learned Limón used to work in marketing as well. I find that comforting, having made a career transition from academia to marketing myself. She’s one of my favorite contemporary poets.
Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore, PhD, a book on grief that my therapist recommended. According to the intro, it “illuminates the emotional impact of grief and the psychological, relational, and spiritual elements of healing and transformation.”
Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice by Dr. Willie Parker, a fabulous pro-abortion book by a Black Southern Christian abortion doctor.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion I’m re-reading this, actually. I read it when it first came out, but it’s actually reaching me now. I’ll leave you with this quote I underlined this morning:
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking