“What’s love got to do with it (grief)?” Tina Turner sang the answer to this question in this song from her 1984 album, “Private Dancer.” “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?” It’s said that grief is the price we pay for love. Since we are destined to eventually lose everything and everyone that we love, we invite loss and grief when we commit to love and care for another. I do have to disagree with the song’s description of love “as a second-hand emotion.” It seems much more central to our well-being than that.
Thought love, (finding it, having it or losing it), is the most common topic in most every genre of popular music, I’m not sure we have common agreement about what love is. I’m afraid I can’t fully agree with the message of John Lennon’s Beetle anthem that “all you need is love,” but like many others, I would join Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach’s assertion that “What the world needs now is love sweet love, that’s the only think there is too little of.” The artist Robert Indiana, whose pop art sculpture of the letters LOVE inspired Lennon’s hit, spent years fulfilling his goal “that LOVE should cover the world.”
“Grieving is the practice of feeling the pain of loss,” according to author Valarie Kaur, and our love for another means that we join them in their sorrow. Yet sometimes in our positivity
addicted culture, we protect one another from the truth of our individual and communal losses.The spiritual teacher Ram Dass suggested “when you love someone you don’t want to lay your suffering on them or your fears.” But this means when we engage in this game of ‘pretending’, we cannot give and receive support and companioning, which is what grieving requires.
One of the most challenging situations to grieve is when love itself seems lost. When there is a rupture in an important relationship, as in the separation and divorce of marriage partners, or estrangement with a family member or friend once held dear, one must bring that love that now has nowhere to go, in close to oneself. Self love and self care are needed to carry us through that pain which, like death itself, can feel like a kind of dismemberment.
Sharing a love of dogs or tennis, gardening, or golf, can create lasting bonds of connection and love between and among people,–communities of support for when losses occur. This seems a part of loving life itself. The author Agatha Christie put it this way, “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
One thing my life has taught me is that when people come together to hold one another in grief, love shows up. I remember a friend’s comment when we had turned the living room of our home into the dying room, and family and friends gathered around to help us care for our 31-year-old son Kenneth. Carol had dropped off some food or flowers or something we needed, and she said,” It’s hard to leave this house. There is so much love here.” A few days later, after Ken’s celebration-of life-service ended, I was having trouble leaving. I told my husband “I don’t ever want to leave this room. It is so full of love; the molecules of the air are filled with it.” He said, “Well, that’s where Ken is now.”
Colleagues and fellow InterPlay artist and I will be doing a four-part Summer Series The Art of Grieving: How Art Helps Us Live Our Best Lives on the Reimagine platform. We’d love to have you join us for one or all of the sessions. Register Here
