LOSS & THE HAND THAT CREATES

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The Art of Writing Grief

Throughout the history of art and music and literature, loss stands among love and religion as one of the great movers of the hand. Great symphonies, paintings and sculptures, poems and songs, great tombs that survive centuries have all been born of sorrow and loss.  I have recently been reading ancient Greek literature and among the great poems and tragedies and epics we find loss so real one can only intuit personal experience from the insight.

This New Years Day, I lost my father. Dan Unger was a hero to many, a fierce defender of justice in the courts and among those he met. He was an enigma even to those of us who knew him best. He never once said a negative thing about anyone, no matter the dislike he harboured. But he was stubborn and bullheaded, impossible in an argument. He loved, truly loved, few. And those he loved, he loved with a loyalty that could never be touched. For seven days, my sister, my mother, and I (my brother died when I was seventeen) sat by his side, held his hand, sang him songs, recounted his triumphs… and watched him slip away. Helpless. 

 

Unable to sleep for days, I wrote. I wrote on pieces of paper and on the computer. I wrote and wrote (in the flurry of written pages, I managed to finish the manuscript edits on the Young Inventors Guild, Book 2!) and found that I was able to work through some of the impossible grief I felt. It is times of loss that the mind overloads with cries of injustice, wails of sorrow, gasps of disbelief, all rising within until the heavy weight they bring becomes too much to see anything else. We can sometimes let those guardians of grief become the driving force behind the pen or brush and give us room to breathe. In truth, it doesn’t really matter what is on the page or canvas as much as what it does for us to put our sorrows there.

I’ve taught my children to use this source of liberation. If they are angry or sad, let the words out. Put them on paper and let them out. Then, if you want to be rid of the anger, tear up that paper, Burn it, throw it away, flush it. The important thing is to let them out. Words are powerful and can tear you up inside if you don’t find a way to let them out.

The day of my father’s funeral, I was asked to speak. I did. But as I watched the sun come up over the Pacific, thinking of times when he stood beside me watching that same sun over that same ocean, I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote as tears came down my face and blurred the ink on the page. And I took a poem that I wrote, unedited and unchanged, and read that to the people who came to share their stories. This is that poem.

THE SOUND OF THE TREE

The question is not

Whether the tree,

Alone, falling,

Makes a sound.

The question is,

When a great tree falls,

How do we listen?

How can we know?

How do we hear

Before it is too late?

To witness such majesty

To honour age and strength

To be there, to be present,

To listen with our hearts

Knowing all the while

With such a great tree

We are powerless

We can do nothing

But stand there

And be witness

To the end

eden