“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, but my friend Wai Chin Matsuoka describes the relationship differently. “Grief is the evidence of love,” she told me when we were preparing for the event we are collaborating on this Sunday. I agreed that we only grieve when what we have loved is no longer there to receive our love. I remember a woman client telling me she hugged her pillow every night, in deep pain because the love she had for her husband had nowhere to go once he insisted, he didn’t want to be married anymore. I suggested, in this most vulnerable of states, she needed to bestow that love on herself, that she deserves it.
It’s hard to find agreement on what love is but I would not agree that love is a “second-hand emotion,” as Tina’s song suggests. In the popular music of recent generations, the theme of love is sung about in every genre. People are looking for love (sometimes in all the wrong places), or falling in love, (What kind of man am I, who cannot fall in love?) or lamenting the loss of love, or something we love, (where have all the flowers gone?) or hoping to love again, (the second time around.)
Life has given me several lasting images of love that don’t fit what people commonly sing about. One image of parental and grandparental love that has come to me often occurred shortly after my then 4-month-old daughter Corinne and I were in a fender bender type automobile accident. No one was hurt, thought there was a bit of blood on Corinne’s face, but it turned out to be due to a minor cut on her lip. We drove to my aunt’s house, and after checking her out carefully head to toe, my two aunts and I laid her on a double bed and stood around the bed for more than an hour watching her, marveling at her every move and breath. The love we had for this little girl was palatable along with the gratitude we felt for the gift of her being, and for her being in good health.
Perhaps it’s the risk of losing, the fact that all we love is destined to be separated from us–this is where grief and love meet. Valarie Kaur suggests that “grieving is an act of transformation. It deepens our capacity to love.” The only way to avoid grief is to never connect or care about anyone or anything and that’s way too high a price to pay. Grieving with others, being present to one another’s pain, helping one another carry grief, builds new relationships and bonds of solidarity, changing everyone in the process–sometimes even the world as we know it.
We’d love to have you join us this Sunday July 31 from 1 to 2:30 pm when Certified InterPlay leader Wai-Chin Matsuoka, the Wing & A Prayer Pittsburgh Players and I will be exploring these connections between the Art of Grieving and the Art of Love. This is the second of our four-part series on the Reimagine platform on how art helps us live our best lives now. Here’s the link to register https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-art-of-grieving-how-art-helps-us-live-our-best-lives-2
