Creativity and Grief, Part 2

Content Warning: As you likely gathered from the name of this post, it is about grief and death. If you aren’t in a place to think about those hard things, please skip this post. Take care of yourself.

I wonder sometimes if grief is our natural state and all the other emotions are the in between. I wrote about how grief affected my creativity a few years ago. When I think about it I realize I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to keep these kinds of things separate. Grief goes in this compartment. Happiness in this compartment. Other life stuff goes in this compartment. Art is in this compartment over here. I don’t think it’s a very successful coping strategy.

I sat down today to make some art and I just colored. Drew wavy lines. Scribbled hard. I let my mind wander as I just let the colors flow and sooth me. I was sad and thinking of those grieving harder than me. When I started out, I thought would do a monochrome black palette but ended up with bright blues and turquoise, a sea of respite. At least there was joy in the making mixed in with the sadness.

My dad was a Vietnam veteran and I remember him saying once that all of his friends were gone. And he was right, he was in his late 60s at the time and he only had one friend from across all the years of his life who was still alive. And now my dad has been gone three years. I think about him saying that often when someone I know passes. Will there be a time when I look around and I’m the only one left standing?

I’m working on getting a couple of finished art pieces ready for group shows. Hangers on this one. Varnish on that one. Oops, I’m almost out of varnish, order some more so I can get a better coat on that piece before I box it up. Also I need to go to Staples and see if they have boxes. What sizes do I need? These are mechanical tasks that occupy my hands while my mind shies away from thinking about the loss of my friend’s 18 year old son.

The American abstract painter Larry Poons said in a documentary I watched a few years ago:

My only defense against fate is color.

I turn that sentence over and over in my head more than once a week. It’s my Roman Empire. Do I even have a defense against fate? And if it’s not color, what could it possibly be? I think sometimes I’m coloring for my life. Trying to hold onto my life through that color. Make sense of it. Connect with others through it. Make the world an ever so slightly better place by putting my color into it. Have people remember who I am by my pinks and yellows, rusts and midnight blues.

Last Friday two of my friends sat at my kitchen table and we crafted together. It was full of catching up with each other’s lives, good cheese, and a few crochet stitches here and there mixed in with the laughter. It was the day before the accident. Now in my mind there is the crafting day before and the grief coming in hard after.

Tonight I’m envisioning the tiny shrine I want to make. Usually I make them in Altoids tins, but I’m thinking of using a ramen container for this one because that boy could put away some ramen. The hotter the better. I accidentally bought the extra super hot kind once and, after realizing that the flavor was only hot, I quickly sent them over to him via is mom. He was so dang excited over those five bowls of ramen. It seems fitting that his love of this food and his good humor be remembered in this tiny art offering. I’m thinking of including this poem by E.E. Cummings:

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Are you grieving? Heart sore? I’m so sorry. If you need someone to hear your story, email me. I will hold it in confidence, and hopefully writing it out will help you set it down for just a few moments.

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