Creativity and What’s Maybe not so Good about Grief*

I don’t understand creativity. It remains mysterious to me. And I don’t get its connections to grief. Though there is a popular, romantic view of the great artist as a great sufferer, I suspect that this is the result of cultural misconceptions we hold about types like Vincent Van Gogh and some of our tragic American rock stars.

Following Freud, perhaps, we think that creativity is a result of something repressed, twisted, or criminal in us, rather than—just possibly—something good and even God-given. Some people say that they will only write or paint when they are depressed; but I have found that depression does not enhance my creativity. Though some have urged various platitudes on me when I have suffered—for instance, that I should make lemonade out of lemons when things have gone wrong—I have found that loss in my life has a shattering effect.

Mainly, I can talk in terms of my own experience, which has suggested to me that this popular idea of the tortured artist is wrong. Maybe eventually, after I’ve lived with the loss for a while, I may start the lemonade. But not right away. In loss, it is as though my own house, built on false optimism, has been looted and violated. Everything I hoped for has been taken.

In The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg quotes Gerald L. Sittser, whose family was lost in a car accident, in the following passage:

Loss creates a barren present, as if one were sailing on a vast sea of nothingness. Those who suffer loss live suspended between a past for which they long and a future for which they hope. They want to return to the harbor of the familiar past and recover what was lost…Or they want to sail on and discover a meaningful future that promises to bring them life again…Instead they find themselves living in a barren present that is empty of meaning.

This description rings true for me. Twenty-seven years ago, my sister was killed in a car accident after a winter storm. Though everyone in my family did eventually go on to live productive lives, none of us was the same after that loss. Those first years after the accident were some of the hardest times I’ve known; we knew that “barren present empty of meaning.”

The truth is that I don’t even like grief. When someone I know has lost a loved one, I’d sooner not spend too much time with them. I might even tell them to make lemonade from their lemons, or some other platitude that helps me to get through the moments I have to spend with them. Even after all I’ve suffered, I don’t comfort well those who are mourning. I don’t understand it and don’t want to. Wiser cultures than ours have professional mourners, those who openly grieve and wail and moan with those who have lost someone. It is very healthy to mourn, to grieve, and to wail.

Ecclesiastes strangely puts it this way: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of everyone, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (Ecclesiastes 7:4).

Given the choice between a day at the amusement park and a day at a funeral home, I know what I’d choose. But Ecclesiastes urges otherwise, and I accept it as one of the many truths that is deeper and higher than I am. But it seems that something in loss, in this place that is empty of meaning that we don’t like to imagine, instructs us. I can learn from those in mourning.

When really faced with loss, some people never do pottery or poetry again. As one character in a story I haven’t been able to publish claims, “Tragedy brings us news of our mortality.” Loss hasn’t made me more creative. What it has done is make me aware of my own brokenness. And that is human, what I have in common with everyone else. 

*(full disclosure: this is a repeat of a  blog I wrote several years ago for "Run the Path." I redo it now, with a few additions and edits, because my family and friends have recently been facing loss; and as noted above, grief doesn't lead to high levels of work or creativity for me.)