Grieving as a creative process

I haven’t been getting as much paper-craft design work in lately, but here’s a tiny bit of progress on the whale tail.

I’ve been spending some of my of creative energy the last few weeks helping a friend who recently received a distressing medical diagnosis. I always want to validate her emotions, because I know from personal experience how awful it is to have one’s emotions dismissed. But I also know from personal experience how problematic it can be to stop trying, so I’ve done what I can to encourage her to see positive possibilities on the other side of the most negative emotions.

One day, I found myself saying this: “The sooner you accept the situation, the sooner you will be able to start figuring out how your life is going to be awesome anyway.”

The thing is, any kind of loss will rearrange your life and make it chaotic. And maybe you’re a “creative type” and will turn to writing or painting or something like that to deal with your grief, but whether you do that or not, you will eventually want a less chaotic life. And it’s that process— the process of dealing with the chaos as it happens, and eventually the process of reducing the chaos— that is creative.

As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also realized that I don’t think of grieving as something that necessarily goes away or has an end point. It’s wonderful when the passage of time eases the pain of loss entirely, but some losses are so big that they will always shape the way you interact with the world. Figuring out how to move forward anyway, not pretending the loss doesn’t exist, but also not letting your focus on it become all-consuming, is an intensely creative process.

I also said this to her: I actually think that suffering is inherently meaningless. If it has meaning at all, it’s because we make it have meaning— we create meaning. As a woman of faith, I believe that God is utterly willing to help in this particular creative process.

I don’t have much else to say this week. Well, maybe I do, but I don’t have much more time to write, and I want to get this posted. Better luck next week. :)