Learning to Grieve (pt 1)

Grief is a mistress. A perfectly imperfect art. There is no doing it just right. We either grieve too much or not enough. And the act of grieving itself seems useless and rather self-serving. Why bother doing it? Does it actually accomplish anything good?

Do we really honor the dead or the missing relationships in our life if we grieve? Are we really helping anyone (ourselves included) by grieving? This is the question. If we are simply re-living hard things to get an emotional fix, grief can be selfish.

There is much to be lost.

This is the tension of grief. It can be a black hole we get stuck in, an endless pit of despair. Yet, a completely necessary stop. Like any necessary rest points, most people either want to ignore them or stay in them way too long. Resist both.

There is another way to experience grief. I hesitate to call it a “healthy” way to grieve. But there is health in grieving well. Grieving properly can give life. In some cases, it is the only way to life. Creative people must learn to grieve well in order to create well.

Not that we can consume or manipulate grief to “produce” for us. Life does not work that way. Creativity does not work that way. We don’t voyeuristically look into another's situation to pick off some low-hanging fruit for inspiration.

It doesn’t work like that.

Grief can not be fooled, nor suffering satiated with such indolence. Yet neither can we come into grief with arms wide open. Some find in grief a sort of escapist pleasure that relieves, at least for now, the pressures (and even the failures) of their own life.

This is not it either.

Instead we must enter grief humbly. Respectfully. Not excited. Broken. Trusting in mercy. We go in believing we will come out. We go trusting the process will somehow make us more whole, not less. This is the foundation of faithful grieving.

We must not, and can not, avoid grief, nor situations requiring it. We also can not poach it like some cheap substitute for inspiration. We can not borrow grief, but must enter it ourselves, humbly. Respectfully. Compassionately. Trusting in mercy.

Grief is a universal language. It connects all of humanity. Worldwide. Across all times. Timeless. Death and grief are some of life's most far-reaching, expansive experiences. Their connective power is massive. Their portraits intimately bind us together

We all share in them somehow.

Our ability to communicate, especially as artists, requires intimate knowledge of grief. Otherwise we are speaking in third person. We are visitors, only. We will simply not own our experience, and it will show. Poets and artists must know grief.

But again not to manipulate or control that experience. A true experience of grief dictates its own terms. It is not meant to be “productive.” It is not a networking meeting (“grief and despair, meet inspiration”). It is simply a part of being human.

We must lose something. It is not always another human. Sometimes we lose an idea, sometimes hope, sometimes a phase of our life. There is no shortage of things to grieve, or loss to be suffered.

Shared suffering will always be at the heart of all human connection.