Dancing
with Everything
The Arts and Collective Grieving
Collective grief is stimulated by large scale losses and tragedies, some impacting people and communities far from the initial ground zero of the event. I began putting together the material for my current book during the lock down phase of COVID when most everyone’s list of recent losses was extensive. In my dance studio turned media studio I opened my zoom window on the world and family members, students and colleagues from around the country joined me in taking the first steps in grieving –recognizing and naming individual and communal losses. In the years since, there has been no shortage of community-wide tragedies that need to be collectively grieved. Reports of mass shootings in schools, shopping malls and places of community worship or celebration flicker across our various size screens along with the images of environmental climate devastations like floods, fires, and earthquakes.
Writing The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives was a discovery project, one begun as a writing practice blog. I looked at most everything that was unsettling, disappointing, even devastating, in our individual and communal lives through the lens of loss and the need to grieve it. The secondary emphasis to my exploration was how art done on our behalf or made by a mourner for themselves or as they companion another, can help us to grieve. Discovering these connections offered extensive examples and confirmed their powerful effect.
- Healing the Culture
Art can call attention to a cultural problem or injustice in such a way that it makes an emotional impact, inspiring people to act to change the unfortunate circumstances that created it. I learned of the problem of more than one-thousand missing and murdered native women and children in North America when visiting the native American relatives of my native American granddaughter. Kyra was 9 years old at the time when she joined a friend and I as we visited an art instillation of the Red Dress Project in the desert near Palm Springs, CA. Standing in the dry dusty breeze we move our focus to the red dresses hanging on clotheslines, each dress blowing independently at various rhythms as the wind swirls around them. We experience the women’s presence, in this marking of the absence of their bodies to fill the dresses.
In the quiet, yet powerfully loud social commentary, I hear a protest and remember the wisdom of grief expert, Francis Weller. He suggests, “Part of the medicine we need right now is to come out of the fiction that grief is individual.” Or to imagine that grief ends with the generation that first experienced the loss. “If the sequestered grief that surrounds us made a sound, the whole world would be weeping.”
- Art helps the healing of those impacted by horrific incidents of loss–gun violence,
History and fate had put me in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania a few miles from the Tree of Life Synagogue where on 10.27. 2018, a lone gunman killed eleven worshipers and wounded six including several Holocaust survivors. In the years since I have had the opportunity to closely observe and participate in the communal rituals and art projects that the 10.27 Partnership has initiated and coordinated. I wrote about the 5th anniversary Commemoration Ceremony to honor and remember the lives lost.
“As leaves flutter gently down from nearby trees, friends and family members share stories of their deceased loved ones before an audience of several hundred community members…Musicians play restored string instruments from the Violins of Hope, an exhibition of instruments played by Jewish musicians before and during the holocaust. The message, communicated through the rhythmic tones of the music is one we are all living: how the human spirit can overcome even the most daunting of circumstances.”
A good place to explore the topic of Collective Grief is the online platform Let’s Reimagine Life, Love and Loss. Here’s a link to programs on this month’s theme– https://letsreimagine.org/the-whole-world-in-our-hands
Join me and colleagues Sunday afternoon November 24 at 4 pm eastern time – https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-art-of-grieving-how-art-art-making-help-us-grieve
The Morning After
I arrived home last night from my job as a poll watcher about 9 pm. I warmed up some soup and checked the television news for early returns as the polls were closing across the country. Checking into my own body, I realized I had “left it all on the field,” as the sports athletes say, after weeks of door-to-door canvasing and nightly phone banking and I went to bed. I was surprised seeing the sorrow on my husband’s face when I awoke at 8 am since I was not expecting any definitive election results to be available this early. In 2019 it took 6 days for enough of the votes to get tallied to declare a winner, and my county in PA, along with my friend Christine’s in GA were the ones that determined that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were going to the White House.
Rather than checking the news reports I attended to the text stream of my women’s spirituality group which included this encouragement from our teacher and leader Glenda Taylor “I have no shallow words to say, but I do send calm certainty, ‘Love endures and is never defeated.”
Next in the stream my friend Christine asks, “Who are we in this moment? When our hearts are broken, and cynicism is sneaking in to help us side-eye our neighbors.”
I’m reminded of the people whose front porches I have stood on throughout the Pittsburgh region and of the essential similarities I found. No matter the size and quality of the home, or the amount of land surrounding it, or the idyllic peaceful scene of the neighborhood most everyone is afraid of their neighbors. Many are afraid of family members. Most wouldn’t put up yard signs supporting candidates, and some expressed concerns for my safety as I traveled in their neighborhood. “You be careful now.”
Christine continues, “Who do I want to be in this moment? Yes, there is a part of me that wants to curl up in a ball under the covers…but a bigger part that gazes out through my tears and feels the resolve in my heart that there is more goodness in the world–let me look to find it and work towards it. I want to be the light that shies hope in a dark situation.”
During my day long stint as a poll watcher, I was able to observe that goodness and light in a dark situation. First off, I ran into a musician friend, Mimi Jong, who was participating in a project called Play for the Vote. “What are you doing here?” she greeted me cheerfully. “You don’t live in this neighborhood. “Though it wasn’t my neighborhood, I, along with the poll workers and people who came to vote, as we moved in and out of the building were serenaded by the calming tones of the musical collaboration between Mimi’s Chinese erhu and her colleagues’ robust accordion. I received another gift in the opportunity to get to know an experienced woman poll worker who had worked these polls for over twenty years. I noticed nearly everyone, both young and old, who entered the auditorium space stopped to give her a hug before or after placing their votes. Turns out she had been a crossing guard in the neighborhood for over twenty years, a job she had dearly loved, and she was still, years later beloved by all.
Back to the text stream–Jean expressed her “need simply to mourn. Deeply. Mourn for that which has claimed power and mourn for that which has lost and will surely suffer. Yes, I will rise up and fight…but I need space and time to grieve as well.”
For me, this is the time to mourn- to listen to the wisdom of my own body, to rest, and dance, and wail and moan–to express whatever sound is there. This reality is unprocessed–we do not know what this loss will teach us and what it will ask of us. I am sustained by the knowledge that I will be in our women’s circle in person soon.
The doorbell rings and I experience another action to take when the answer to our prayers is, for this time at least – a firm no. My colleague and dancing social worker friend Lynn is here to present me with a bouquet of flowers. It is an expression of her gratitude for what I have been doing on behalf of the citizens of the Pittsburgh region. She discovered that acts of kindness make her feel better as she helps someone else feel better. What a delightful surprise in this dark day. This takes me back to Glenda’s message–“Love endures and is never defeated”. And a message that emerged from the 10.27.2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue that has been ringing true since then –“Love is stronger than hate,” and so, too, we together are.
Here’s an article by Daniel Hunter, recommended by my mentor and colleague Cynthia Winton-Henry. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/
I also recommend online programs on the Reimagine platform, especially on communal grieving – https://letsreimagine.org/experiences/upcoming-events
Remembering and Making Meaning through The Art of Storytelling
Last Sunday, amid the extreme bruhaha in the swing state of Pennsylvania related to the upcoming national election I attended the Commemoration Ceremony of the sixth anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. Eleven people lost their lives, and four others were injured in the worst attack on Jews in the history of the United States. This occurred in an area of the city locals always referred to as “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, the organization that has provided resources and support to the Jewish and non-Jewish community throughout the past six years began the commemoration. She acknowledged the impact of that event. “We’re here today to remember six years ago when our Pittsburgh community and Jewish people around the world were forever changed by an act of violence, changed because of the loss and suffering, but also changed because of the incredible outpouring of kindness and solidarity.” A part of the legacy of the attack is the realization that “we are stronger together.” Since I have attended most all of the these yearly commemorations and ceremonies I would add that today they prove the truth in the slogan born of the event, “Love is stronger than hate.”
I watch family members and survivors of the violence approach the platformed stage, assist one another in navigating the steps and in lighting the candles, as the names of their loved ones are called. They offer hugs and appreciation for one another and to the professional helpers that Mr. Rogers always told the children to look for. I look around the large, packed room that holds maybe 100 people, some seated, many more standing on both sides of the room. I take in the energy of the supportive respectful silence. My mind travels back to images of people I have been meeting and talking with as I’ve been canvassing for the election in many outlying neighborhoods in the region. These people here look like they could be related to the potential voters I have met but the fear of one’s neighbors and the anxiety and uncertainty of the future I found outside this room are thankfully absent from here.
Noah Schoen, the co-creator of the Meanings of October 27th Oral History Project summarized what he learned from the stories of 100 Jewish and non- Jewish members of the Pittsburgh community. With some time to reflect, they were invited to tell their own stories about the attack and what it now meant to them. “I learned two things,” Schoen said. “We get to choose the stories we tell about the attack. We get to choose how and what we remember.
As he speaks, I see an image I choose to always remember from that time. A few days after 10/27/2018 my husband and I called a Jewish couple who are close friends and asked if we could come with them to the next Friday night service in their synagogue. It’s dusk as we arrive with our friends and park the car. Moving towards the entrance to the synagogue our path is lit by dozens of people ahead of us holding lighted candles. Reaching the sidewalk to the entrance we join other congregants and process through two rows of Christian and non-Jewish neighbors, each holding a candle and standing in a silent solidarity of support. I look at this scene through damp eyes.
The word “oscillation” gets my attention as Schoen suggests the back and forth between horror and appreciation that’s needed to tell a story that builds resilience and helps people to tell their stories in what I call, “transforming ways.” Such stories as these are too big for one or even two bodies to hold. They must be told and held in community. Oral History is that kind of storytelling. According to Schoen, “The truth is multi-vocal art; a collection of individual narratives that paints a more nuanced picture of the community’s experience than any one story. Let’s keep telling stories about that day, about the people who we lost and the people who touched us, about what we can’t seem to get over and about what we never expected to learn.”
Healing from atrocities takes a lifetime, but in community, what is broken mends, not by putting it behind us but by remembering and keeping its transforming meanings and community members close.
The Art of Grieving Domestic Violence
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so designated as such in 1987. In the nearly 40 years since congress passed Public Law 101-112 officially designating October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, hopefully we have become more aware as a culture of what domestic violence is, who can be its victims, how pervasive it is in our culture, and how to address it. Current figures of intimate partner violence in the US show 22% of women and 19.3 % of men being assaulted by their partners at least once in their lifetime. Younger dating populations have higher rates which has caused programs for prevention to start early, beginning with anti-bullying programs in elementary, middle and high schools. Programs to engage men and boys have proved helpful, moving good men from having an interest in the matter to making an investment in standing up against the bullying and terroristic attitudes and behaviors of their perpetrating brothers.
An innovative project Standing Firm, the Business Case to End Partner Violence, now affiliated with the Pittsburgh Women’s Center and Shelter, teaches employers about the critical role they can play in protecting the workplace from violence. Four women a day lose their lives at the hands of someone with whom they once shared a bond of trust and love. The potential for violence in the workplace increases once a woman finds a safe haven in a shelter– her aggressor doesn’t know where she lives, but he knows where she works.
Through the years one of the most difficult issues to understand is expressed in the question, “Why doesn’t she just leave.” As I’ve looked more closely at family estrangements of all types, I’ve decided that looking at partner violence through the lens of grief might help answer this question. People in close relationships often reveal to one another, and see one another, at their best and at their worst. Sometimes these two aspects are not well integrated with one another, so it seems like the person is two people. One day the person you met and fell in love with, or the person you raised, or knew in a positive way for years begins treating you as an enemy, and the source of all their unhappiness. Then, perhaps they apologize or, even if they don’t, they seem to regret their behavior and begin treating you in a more positive way. Now it seems the person you love has returned and you reinvest in the relationship. Then the cycle begins all over again.
For many people, it is hard to give up on those we love and on the dream of what we hoped for when the relationship began. If the person dies, we are forced to separate. In that case, funeral rituals and family and community members provide support and companionship as the person grieves the loss and reconfigures their life without the loved one. When the person is still alive, but the bond of trust is broken, grieving this loss is more complex and complicated. Both parties need to learn, in order to continue loving themselves, and for the safety and health of those around them, how to love this estranged person from afar. When the person longer operates out of love or resembles the person we fell in love with, or raised, or befriended and becomes a danger to themselves and their partner, both parties need support to separate and begin reconfiguring a new life without one another. The community of support which shelters have put together in recent years includes medical personnel, (doctors, nurses, social workers,) lawyers, police officers, financial advisors, volunteers, and foundations.
If you live in the Pittsburgh area – Here’s something not to miss –
I’m excited to be providing one of the keynote presentations for The Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh’s 50th anniversary offering– a day long Supporting Survivors Summit. Over 100 participants will be exploring the complexities of domestic violence this Friday Oct. 25, 2024 at the Regional Learning Alliance and Conference Center in Cranberry PA. Love to see you there.
The Impact of an Art Image on the Art of Grieving
Most communication, especially for teachers and writers involves finding the right words. As a therapist whose first profession was as a dancer, I often use expressive arts to help people connect with the creative side of themselves and to help process the experiences that life is currently presenting them. Frequently these challenges involve loss or the anticipation of losing something or someone that feels essential to life itself.
For the past 30 + years I’ve used the modal expressive art forms of InterPlay which involve storytelling, dancing, music, voice, and stillness. These art forms get people in their bodies and more fully into the present moment–the only place where transformation can occur. These forms can be done in a one-on-one situation, but their power is enhanced when they happen in a group. People would ask, “who are these groups for?” and my answer would be, “anyone I can talk into them.”
As a grief advocate, I have not always been able to find the right words to convince people that grief, when experienced in the presence of loving companions is not something to fear or run away from as Western culture has led us to believe. Misconceptions about the grieving process abound which is no small matter since grieving well is our essential connection to what really matters and to a meaningful vital future life.
As a mental health professional, I had been taught Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 stage model of grief, the one that continues to appear in most every journalist’s article about grief. The model first appeared when the Swiss-born American psychiatrist published her first book, On Death and Dying in 1969. It was a theory to encourage psychological counseling for the dying. How it has become most everyone’s model of processing the emotions of grief has been a mystery to me. Researcher, John Bernau in his article, “The institutionalization of Kubler-Ross’s Five Stage Model of Death and Dying,” suggests it was “early scientific interest and commercial promotion” that is responsible for the popularity of the model and notes its current use as a model is “to understand everything from rent prices to COVID-19.”
Besides the fact that Western culture tries to reduce everything to a step by step, one and done intellectual process, my curiosity has led me to focus on the role of the angular graphic image of the model featured in the original edition. After all, we know the power of an image, it’s worth a thousand words. Reading from left to right we view the shape of upward stairsteps, each named with a different emotion on each step– “denial,” “bargaining,” “anger,” “depression.” Arriving at the top landing we read the word “acceptance.” As a dancer, I can almost feel the action of climbing the stairs, ticking off each emotion and then, arriving at the top–brushing the palms of my hands together in the gesture of completion. “I did it. I’ve arrived. It is finished.”
Noting the quotation marks around the word “Stage” in the phrase “’Stages” of Grief” underneath the image, I’m certain that Kubler-Ross did not intend for this process to be viewed as a series of linear steps or stations, but in my own work with clients, I feel it necessary to point out that though all the feelings listed in the model could and often do occur in the long arch of grieving, there are many emotions missing including critical ones like anguish and sorrow. And though I usually wait awhile before introducing the notion, I eventually remind people that it’s possible to feel more than one emotion at the same time. Eventually experience teaches all mourners that grieving bears little resemblance to this organized illustration of the grieving process, leaving us longing for a model that comes closer to our actual experiences of grief and loss.
I discovered a better image for the grieving process while during the research for my recent book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives. In “A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis, which was published in 1961, nearly a decade before Kubler-Ross’s work, he shared in his description of his own experience of grief, what I’ve come to believe to be elements of a universal model. It fits better with the experiences of mourners and helps explain some of the odd occurrences people in early grief report. “For in grief nothing ‘stays put. ‘One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round, everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope, I am on a spiral.”
Found in cultures worldwide, the spiral is one of the oldest intuitive images and symbols of the physical, mental, and spiritual development of a human life as it winds its way through the seasons of its years. Representing the cycle of the seasons and the cycles of life, growth, and change, the spiral brings us back to the same place each season but on a more evolved level, offering new perspectives with each turn. The anniversary of the loss occurs, but the mourner now has had another year of living without their beloved, and they are viewing the situation from a different vantage point.
As the cover of my new book features a multicolored image of a spiral designed by a Pittsburgh artist, Crista Varley I have been engaged in a kind of unintended informal experiment. The spiral image seems to captivate people who view it, drawing them in to explore the subject with me or the contents within. One art museum carrying the book placed it near the checkout counter and found the image stimulated impulse purchases, sometimes as gifts to friends dealing with grief. Other books of mine on grief, like my 2013 mother’s memoir, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal did not stimulate such a welcoming response.
Help Resolve the Grief of Releasing Creative Projects
If your work is in a so called, “creative field” you may already be familiar with the type of loss that I am focusing on today. For writers, performance artists, designers of various types that engage in projects requiring intense dedication and a considerable length of time –– once the project comes to an end, the producer or performer experiences loss and many questions of identity and purpose. The manuscript is finished, opening night has come and gone, the deliverables have been delivered. The completion itself is life changing.
Who are we now that the structure provided to our lives by the project is gone? Our creative production now needs to be distributed or presented and received by its audience, but much is required of its creator to make that happen. And this getting our work out into the larger world makes very different demands on us than those demands of the creative phase. How has the effort to create this product or event changed us? Are we being changed further by the comments of friends and family members, and in the official reviews of people who claim to know? It seems we are risking encouragement and discouragement, elation and disappointment. In this new phase it can feel like we are risking losing ourselves.
When I was in high school and the final night of the dance concert wrapped up, or the cast party for the school play was over, I noticed the mix of emotions that accompanied this bittersweet time. There was the self-satisfaction of accomplishment, “we did it” and the sadness of saying goodbye to the people and activities that had been the focus of many months of my life.
As a writer, I’ve known the reluctance to decide that I have come to the end. Might there be something else this piece needs to stand on its own and deliver the messages I have struggled for months or years to express? A friend who writes poetry told me that as she edits the poem, again and again, (and poets are really picky about where the comma goes), when the arrangement of the words returns to the same place a third time, she declares the poem done.
This after phase of a creative project is not spoken of as often as the crafting part, yet it seems to be as important to the work and the wellbeing of the work’s creator. As a writer who has just released my 4th book the end of May, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s new book The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done has come just in time. If like me, once you have completed the production phase of your creative work, it now demands more from you than you feel comfortable and skilled enough to give––Elizabeth’s new guidebook will be just right for you too. She offers her releasing process to help “spare us some grief,” so we may form habits “that support our project’s final flourishing and keep us creatively engaged.” As I work through the suggested activities in the book, I hope to find personal answers to the critical questions The Release raises. “Is it possible to approach the period after finishing (one’s work of art) as an opportunity for continued creativity? What might it look like to stay grounded as we share our work with its intended audience?”
I recommend this book to anyone who has suffered the depression and anxiety that often accompanies getting creative work out into the larger world. Consider not only getting a copy for yourself but gifting the book to young writers and artists in your community to spare them the grief we experienced creatives know all too well.
Another way to help ––It takes a village to get a book or art project to its intended audience so if you get the book and find it useful, please leave a three-sentence review on the bottom of the book’s Amazon page. It takes a minimum number of reviews to have the search engine recommend a book when people begin shopping for a book on a particular subject on the Amazon platform. While you’re there, I would be most grateful if you would become a part of my book village by leaving a three-sentence review on the amazon page for my new book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives. With both these actions, you will play an important part in making what Elizabeth calls, “the transformational dimension of writing” available to more people who seek it.
Anticipatory Grief – How can it work for us?
Not sure when it started, but it feels like once I left home in my late teens, I always had the fear of becoming a bag lady. And when I’ve shared this fear with women friends of my generation, they admit that they too experienced this anticipatory grief throughout many years of their adult lives. We realized, in a system where money is what’s needed to prevent such an outcome, the deck was stacked against us. In the 60s and 70s women earned 50% of what men earned doing the same job. In my case, the man I supervised at the university made more money than I did. Without being able to get a credit card or a mortgage in our own name, and with a 50% chance of
marriages ending in divorce, most women were one responsible man away from becoming what we now refer to as “unhoused.”
The economic picture for women and most people in the US is much improved a half century later but as I walk the neighborhoods and attempt to hold phone conversations with potential voters, anxiety about the future is a major source of people’s uncertainty and indecision about what will best prevent their anticipatory grief which they already have begun to feel.
Uncertainties in the marketplace are not new. We’ve had periods of inflation, high interest rates, recessions, and corporate downsizing where jobs and even whole industries have been eliminated. For voters in Pennsylvania memories are still vivid of when the Pittsburgh Steel mills disappeared in the 1980s. Global steel production had shifted to China and 150,000 workers lost their jobs and their livelihoods. Now, 40 years later a Japanese company is attempting to buy US Steel, promising they won’t move any jobs overseas. But is it a good idea for an industry vital to our national security to be owned by another country?
Big questions we don’t know the answers to. And who do we trust to answer them? Since the lockdowns and isolation of the pandemic, and the conspiracy theories spawned by misinformation and disinformation through social media, trust in government and in one another
has been sorely tested. Change is the only constant, but this can be small comfort when new technology causes another class of workers, those with creative white-collar jobs to question, when will AI eliminate our jobs?
So, life’s scary with many big changes outside of our control. Our anticipatory grief is telling us to pay attention and learn how to marshal and manage our fear. Turning to the arts, I remember a song from the King and I, a show I performed in while I was still in high school. Anna teaches the song to her son who is nervous about moving to another country. Lots of important truths embedded in her advice.
It’s best to not let people know how afraid you are–
“Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect I’m afraid.”
Acting differently can change feelings–
“The result of this deception
Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people
I fear I fool myself as well.”
Perhaps – Fake it till you make it?
“Make believe you’re brave
And the trick will take you far
You may be as brave
As you make believe you are.”
Finally, after a news broadcast that often contains horrible news, (Warning: the report you are about to see is disturbing), Lester Holt signs off with the following advice – “Please take care of yourself and one another.” For me, this is the only answer that makes sense.
Broken Hearts, Broken Families, Broken Careers
A family therapy expert whose name I can’t recall, or I would give him proper credit said something when I was a student in his class that I’ve never forgotten all these years later– “You can never be rid of anyone, (and I would add, anything) that you have ever loved.” At the time I wrote this sentence in my notebook, I happened to be grieving a separation from my husband of 12 years. I found this truth both depressing and hopeful at the same time. I still do.
Ambiguous Grief is one of the most difficult loss experiences to traverse. The loss of a relationship due to divorce leaves both parties, and their children and friends flailing about for clues on how to behave and how to treat one another. Unlike when someone dies, there are no communal rituals or traditions to follow. I remember suggesting to my soon-to-be ex-husband that since we couldn’t make a good marriage, perhaps for the sake of our children, and ourselves we could strive to make a good divorce. Somehow, we did, but when I spoke those words, despite being a family therapist myself, I had only a sketchy idea of how we would accomplish that.
Addiction, dementia, mental illness, these medical issues in a loved one can make them no longer available for the relationship we used to have with them. The person is still alive, but they are not the same, so the relationship cannot be the same. So, neither can we be the same person we were. I did still get to be the” big sister “to my younger sister Pat who lost herself and her own memories over a period of 10 years through mild cognitive difficulties to eventual Alzheimer’s disease. When she lived in a facility and I couldn’t see her for a period, I would always worry that she wouldn’t remember me. It was a blessing that she always did though she sometimes couldn’t figure out what my face was doing on that iPad screen that a staff member was holding for us to communicate. “That looks like my sister, “she would say, and I would, with relief and joy in my voice say, “It is your sister,” and I’d begin talking about something we had done together, reminding her of conversations we’d had. She would smile and seem to be remembering it, though maybe she was experiencing it again for the first time.
In my book The Art of Grieving, How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives, the hardest chapter to write was the one on family estrangement. This type of loss does not only separate children from parents, and grandparents from grandchildren, but being treated as an unwelcomed guest in a relationship where closeness and affection once existed turns out to be one of the cruelest types of ambiguous grief –raising the question, to whom do we belong?
The hopeful part of what my teacher offered his students that day is the notion that whether a loved one dies or is for other reasons no longer available to us to receive the love we have for them, love itself never dies. I’ve found art most helpful in staying in touch with my love of loved ones gone from my sight for whatever reason. There is a statue of two young girls, one a bit taller than the other, in the courtyard garden outside my office. Pat gave this to me years ago to honor our relationship. It accompanied me through her long illness and now that she has transitioned to larger life, it still comforts me. I still tell stories of my ex-husband George and remember how he jokingly refer to my second husband Richard as his “husband in law.”
Transforming Grief and Rage into Courage and Action
It’s been 23 years since four Islamist terrorists, members of al-Qaeda, engaged in coordinated suicide attacks against the United States in 2001. At 8:14 am EDT on that morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the East Coast to California. Each year on the anniversary of that horrific event there are public ceremonies at each of the sites of the now holy ground, consecrated by those whose lives were lost on that day.
The long arc of grief from these crucible moments continues to change us as individuals and communities, and as a nation. It is a common truth that it isn’t what happens to us, it’s how we react to it. Initially, in the shock and disbelief we drew closer, and became more patriotic. But soon, the anger and rage at this assault on our autonomy and sense of security, caused us to go to war and seek revenge in that “eye for an eye” that Mahatma Gandhi warned “will make the whole world blind.”
Brad Wolfe, in the foreword to my recently released book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives, suggests that there are only 3 broad responses to grief: 1) Repression. We can attempt to suppress grief’s emotional energy. However, we know this is unhealthy, ineffective, and almost impossible to sustain. 2) Harmful externalization: We let it out but in ways that are unhealthy, leading toward further suffering for ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and even the planet. 3) Healthy externalizations, which my book suggests can be through the arts and creative communal expressions of love and remembering.
Lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur, became radicalized while traveling the country to assist members of her Sikh spiritual community who were being attacked, even murdered because they “looked like the terrorists” in their dress or their accents sounded like “dangerous strangers. “These experiences pushed her deeper into the wisdom of her ancestors’ Sikh tradition and in 2020 she wrote and published See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love.
Yesterday on the 23rd anniversary of 9.11, Kaur released her new book, Sage Warrior which explores responding to the world not from the wound but from a seat of wisdom, pleasure, rest, and joy. She recommends channeling our grief and rage into courage and action. The actions she is taking involve offering an immersive experience of the arts of storytelling, music, song, ancestral wisdom and community-building through The Revolutionary Love Bus Tour. There are stops in 40+ cities across the country. Let your action be finding a Revolutionary Love tour stop near where you– https://revolutionarylove.org/tour/#calendar
The Art of Storytelling and Grief in the Body Politic
The national election in the US is happening in 60 days. It’s no secret, we are a divided nation, and no one can be sure how this will all turn out. In fact, the presidential race is so close, uncertainty and fear may be the primary emotions of most citizens. This election cycle has already been full of loss. We have lived through the shock of a major candidate dropping out and being replaced, the anxiety and loss of the ability to view civil, mutually respectful political advertising and conversations. And most anxiety producing–the loss of the certainty we once had that, whoever loses will encourage and cooperate with the peaceful transfer of power. This is a principle of our democracy that had held throughout our history until the last election, and many of us are still in deep grief about that.
The candidates and their campaign invite us to work to get our candidate elected, to make a difference. After all, that is the essence of democracy. And if you happen to live as I do, in one of the states that will determine the election, it doesn’t seem like the right choice to sit this one out, despite the angst we might incur. I’ve rejoined the group of folks I’ve been with in previous elections since the 2008 election. We’ve known hope, and success, heartbreaking loss, and success again. Our group is headed by Denise, a professor of economics who tells me it’s been harder to recruit volunteers this year. I suggest we focus more on the gifts of getting to know our neighbors, neighborhoods and one another better. I’d like to think we are inviting people to come play with us, get together and trade stories, like a band or improv storytelling group. Denise admits that each election cycle gives her enough stories to last her the two years till the next election.
This better describes how people in my own life have approached volunteering for the body politic. My sister Pat and her husband had a great time campaigning successful in the 70s to get a trusted friend elected to the U.S. Congress from Michigan where he served for many years. My friend Rose Miele, a student of the organizer Sol Alinsky, knew how to find the fun in her campaigns to stand up for the rights of special needs children and of the handicapped. One year when she headed the Nebraska Commission on Women, she protected their funding by organizing a group of women to bake pies and place one on the desk of each legislator who would be voting on the bill. Each pie was accompanied with the message, “We’re not asking for the whole pie, just our own small part of it.” (The budgeted money survived to be challenged again another day.)
Phil Porter, a co-founder of InterPlay and my friend and co-author Christine Gautreaux have been teaching a storytelling class on zoom the first Monday of each month. The title is The Body Politic. They invite people to play with their fears and anxieties and their hopes and dreams. They look for consensus and note where the group members’ beliefs diverge. And particularly important, they look at “where we have the power to change things and where we don’t.” Consider joining the sessions. The last one will be on Dec 2nd , 2024, where they will be celebrating and grieving the outcomes of the 2024 election.
https://interplay.org/index.cfm/go/events:event/happening_id/3162/
