It was a tough week. My husband was out of town, and I was left dealing with my kids, not to mention myself, in the midst of a community tragedy. On Easter night, a local father killed his four children and his wife, before taking his own life. The crime was unthinkable and, as I quickly discovered when I tried to answer questions from my first grade daughter, who went to the same school as the man’s children, it was entirely inexplicable.
When I got some free time to myself after the stress of the week, I’d planned to take a hot bath or go to a movie, the new silly looking one with Frances McDormand. Escape surely sounded good. Instead, I holed up in a local café and spent three hours writing about the week’s events, forcing myself to imagine the final hours of the unhinged man and his family. I can’t say I felt better afterward. That implies a lightness that I certainly did not experience. But I did know that I’d sat with the pain of these people’s deaths in a meditative way. It had helped. Writing nearly always helps.
When my father was dying of cancer, I wrote regular entries in an online journal that eventually spanned forty, single-spaced pages. I’d come home from helping to take care of him, switch on my computer, and spend a few minutes or an hour putting down everything I could remember of our evening together. Sometimes when I was with him and it was difficult—watching him unable to remember a colleague’s name or that Jell-O comes in a box and not in a peel, as he once insisted—I’d begin writing in my head. Physically I was with him, but my mind was busy coming up with the right words to capture the color of his skin, the smells of the room, or the incongruity of the CNN newscast. The practice helped me to float a little above the present moment and get through it calmly, while also keeping me grounded in it, aware of the minutiae of dying.
“There are moments of grace all over the damned place, but we forget to be attentive to them and then we don’t notice,” says Joy Conrad. I called Joy today, reminded that she’d started dancing a few years ago around the same time that her son was diagnosed with anorexia. She seemed to be a good person to connect with as I tried to sort out why some of us have this tendency to head further into grief while others are looking for the exit. Since the news of the murders, I had been having a hard time concentrating on work and the daily stuff that keeps us all ticking—laundry, groceries, bills, music lessons. It’s so hard to focus on these mundane details when you are reminded of the enormity of life: illness, birth, death, growth. Joy’s mention of grace helped me understand my afternoon spent writing about the violent deaths. Being attentive is a form of work, good and satisfying work.
Joy had written for years, but like so many women, she’d allowed her creativity to get tapped out by motherhood. Several years ago, a friend who teaches dance and movement convinced her to take a class. “I was a forty-seven year-old among all these twenty-year-olds,” Joy recalls, still amazed at her own nerve. She knew that the classes would take her out of her comfort zone and force her into a new relationship with her body, a body she had not taken very good care of in recent years. A transcendent moment occurred when she allowed herself to be lifted into the air by her classmates. She wasn’t just the oldest person in the room, but the heaviest, too; letting go was scary. But her friend and teacher put her hands on her back and said, “I’m taking the burden off your shoulders, and then you can do it.”
It was at that moment that Joy realized how much weight she’d been carrying for her family—wanting her sons to be happy, lessening her husband’s load so that he could work more, lugging people and things and emotions. “As mothers, we really do become beasts of burden,” she says. Giving herself permission to set down that load two times a week started her on a journey to interpret her life through movement.
Her son had already been diagnosed when she was assigned to choreograph a piece based on something in the news. She found several articles about eating disorders and body image, which led her to perform a solo, which began with her applying red lipstick and mimicking a pole dancer, and ended with her talking about a female friend who cuts herself and her son’s anorexia. She’d been watching her son waste away and had felt helpless. But in performing the piece, she was able to express anger and grief. “The experience provided me with perspective. I finally got that he was part of a much larger cultural problem.”
Diving headfirst into an overwhelming and difficult issue like a loved one’s illness can be frightening, especially as a parent. We’re the ones who are supposed to keep everything together. Neat. Explicable. But some things are too big to be wrapped up. Using our creativity to plum not so much for answers but feelings, patterns, and even solutions of sort. Coming to a crisis as a narrator rather than a character in an unfolding tragedy can change our perspective.
“Fear on top of anxiety,” is how painter Tilly Woodward her feelings after learning that her college-aged son was bi-polar. Although she returned to her painting studio largely to escape from thinking about it—work as a balm certainly has its place—she also realized that the decisions she made as a painter would help her to negotiate the maze of mental health care, insurance, and other issues facing her and her son. “I have to be able to go forward with what’s been given to me,” she says of her predicament as a mother. “And that’s the same as my experience of standing in front of a blank canvas. Each time I’m in the studio, I need to make something out of all of these colors that isn’t just mud.”
Not becoming stymied is, I think, what Tillie has carried from the canvas into her life. Artists not only examine and reflect as part of their daily routine, but they create products from intangibles. When Kathy Eldon’s son Dan was killed while working as a photojournalist in Somalia, she felt the deep grief that any parent would, but she had another reaction, too. “Right away,” recalls the film producer and writer, “I knew I wanted to make a film about him. Within days, I was talking about an exhibition of his and his colleague’s photographs. Then I wrote a book. And another book. And I started speaking. Each thing helped me hold on to my sanity.”
I’ve known Kathy for nearly a decade and helped her write one of those books (Dan Eldon: The Art of Life). Many people have asked me why she does these things. Some people find it unsettling, as though she’s trying to keep Dan alive. Of course she is, to some extent. But much more so, she’s someone who makes sense of her world via creative projects. Examining Dan’s life and death and continuing his work through books and films is not the way many parents choose to grieve, but for Kathy, these works have provided life.
“I would have imploded if I couldn’t have put the grieving energy somewhere,” she says. “With each project and product, I was able to get a little better. With each thing that I did, my life was enriched by the people who I met along the way.”
Painting by Tilly Woodward, titled Empty Nest.