If a heart
breaks in the forest but nobody hears it, did it make a sound? The answer is always yes, but sometimes we’re
not even ready to hear it ourselves. How
lucky we are to have the worlds of art, film, music, and dance – which provide
a safe but cathartic release for our grief until we are strong enough to face
it head on.
The Safety Dance
I can’t even
recall which museum it was, but more than a dozen years later I can still see
myself on the other side of one of those red ropes intended to separate great
works of art from clumsy fingers like mine.
Museums and art had never really been my things, but sometimes in
relationships you have to give a little.
My boyfriend at the time, Roger, was an artist and avid art lover, and I
joined him on several museum outings where I usually made best efforts to
conceal my boredom with varying degrees of success. But that day – that painting – was
different. It was part of an exhibit of
works by Winslow Homer, a prominent 19th century painter who was
best known for his seascapes. The
painting that had so mesmerized me was clearly one of a mother making her way,
with great care but great determination, down a rocky sh ore with an infant in
her arms as the wind and sea raged in their efforts to thwart her. I remember the power that emanated from the
other side of the rope. Uncontained by
the borders of the painting’s frame was the incredible will of that mother to
protect her child.
At the time, my
own mother was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease and would be gone
within the year. Maybe it was her
determination I was seeing, or my own; another mother and child locked in
battle with nature itself but determined not to let each other go. I verbalized a far less articulate version of
what I was experiencing to Roger, sure that he would respond with some
professorial oral history of the painting (in fairness, something he probably
didn’t do quite as often as I remember).
But instead, he just nodded and squeezed my hand.
Whatever I was
seeing that day, it wasn’t what Homer had seen and painted 120 years
earlier. I discovered this only recently,
after moving into a new apartment that had a lot of wall space. I thought of that painting and wanted to get
a reprint of it on canvas. I texted Roger,
no longer a boyfriend but happily still a friend, who replied with an image and
a link to a website where I could buy one.
I was about to do just that, when I noticed under the image was the
title “Summer Night” followed by a brief description which read “ladies dancing
by moonlight.” I called Roger and said
it looked like the painting but must have been a different one – most of old Homer’s
stuff were seascapes after all – and reminded him I wanted the one we had seen
of the mother and child.
“No, that’s the
one,” he said, “look at it closely.” I
stretched my fingers across the image to make it as large as would fit within
the frame of my phone’s screen, and suddenly I saw it. What I had seen as the head of an infant resting
on a woman’s back, was in fact that of a second woman leaning on her
shoulder. Obscured by shadows in the
night sky was another set of arms folding into an embrace. Suddenly the wind and sea were no longer raging;
there was a breeze blowing in time with gentle waves in the background. “Why didn’t you tell me I was so wrong?” I
asked, half accusingly and half laughingly.
“I didn’t have the heart to,” he said, “You had created this whole story
around it. And besides,” he added, “you
weren’t wrong. You were just seeing what
you needed to see.”
There is
something particularly dislocating about the grief you feel watching someone die
from Alzheimer’s or dementia, because you find yourself in the surreal position
of missing someone who isn’t gone yet.
And that almost makes you feel guilty because you know that while part
of you wants their suffering to end, another part of you wants your own
suffering to end too. And still another
part of you doesn’t want to let go at all.
There are so many conflicting and conflicted emotions that it’s little
wonder my connection to the painting was as confused as it was profound. It gave an outlet to a grief I could barely
acknowledge, even to myself.
While that was
a singularly unique experience for me, it reminded me of other times in my life
when art in all its forms – music, theater, film – provided a catharsis for a
specific source of grief I wasn’t yet ready to process. I remember watching the film Marvin’s Room
and crying uncontrollably. The film
focuses on sisters; one played by Diane Keaton, who has devoted herself to
caring for their elderly relatives, and another played by Meryl Streep, who
returns home after a long absence when Keaton’s character becomes seriously ill
herself. The movie is a little clunky in
the way that a stage play transferring to the big screen can often be, as it
tries to open up scenes originally intended for intimately staged sets. But the dialogue and performances are
powerful. Keaton has a heart-wrenching
monologue, after being teased by Streep for never being in love, where she
confides that she did have a secret young love but had never recovered from his
tragic death by drowning. Keaton
recounts the events with as much detachment and even humor as she can muster,
but the ache is still there in her eyes.
By contrast, Streep’s eyes widen with awakening horror as she gradually realizes
what her sister had endured without her ever even knowing. It’s a brief scene but their respective pain
flickers across their faces like shadows falling across the screen.
I first saw the
film in the mid-90s, at which point I hadn’t yet started to navigate the challenge
of caring for elderly parents with my siblings.
Nor had I lost a love to drowning.
Or had I? I had been in a secret,
closeted relationship for nine years which ended when he married a woman. Keeping the relationship a secret had been
hard enough, but I was carried through that by my hope that it would one day work
out and we would be together. But losing
him secretly came with no hope to offset the pain, and it did feel like a death
by drowning; with all those years crashing in like waves around me. If a heart breaks in the forest but nobody
hears it, did it make a sound? If nobody
knew that relationship existed, had it even mattered? Could it even count as love? I told myself for years that it didn’t. I couldn’t even bring myself to discuss it in
therapy until many years later, and even then it felt like a disloyalty or a
betrayal of him somehow. My therapist
looked at me sadly and said, “But it was your life too.”
Grieving
silently, even retroactively, is a tragically common experience among members
of the LGBTQ+ community of a certain age.
And with Pride month in full swing, in addition to the celebratory
parties and political rallies, it’s also a time when deep personal wounds often
get reopened. Sometimes forgotten in the
years since marriage equality became the law of the land is the communal pain of entire generations who could
not love – or even lose love – freely.
For me, it was a love lost to the closet itself; a partner who chose to
create an alternate universe for his life that could not even include his own
true self let alone me. Many others managed
to build lives of love together only to have the final privilege of grief
stolen right out from under them; denied access to hospital rooms or turned
away from funeral homes. And make no
mistake, grief is a privilege every bit as much as love. They are intertwined in the arc of any life’s
story, with grief the inevitable denouement.
Grief should be love’s final lap around the sun, burning and intense but
out in the open like the elements themselves.
When even that is taken from us or forced out of the sun and into the
shadows, there is no resolution. A heart
can never start healing if it never stops breaking.
There is a
climactic scene at the end of Marvin’s Room where Keaton’s character asserts
that she is not afraid of dying because she has had so much love in her
life. Streep agrees that their family
loves her very much. “No, I mean that I
love them,” Keaton replies, “I’m so lucky.”
Tears flood my eyes no matter how many times I hear those words, and I now
understand why. My relationship mattered
because it mattered to me. I thought for
years that I resented this person, maybe even hated him, when the truth was that I
loved him. The truth is that, to this
day, that long-ago relationship nobody knew about is still the love of my
life. How he remembers me, or if he
remembers me at all, is none of my business.
I could never really move past the grief of losing him because I could
never accept or admit how much I had loved him; and therefore, just how much I
had lost. It was love because I loved
him. It was my life too. But before I could come to terms with all of
that, Diane Keaton and Marvin’s Room were the safety valve that allowed
me some emotional release and relief.
Singer-songwriter
Greg Brown has a song called “One Cool Remove” which this listener interprets
as a meditation on the phenomenon of art as catharsis: “One cool remove away from
the things that hurt me,” he sings, “… See it all in a passion play, one cool
remove away.” Shawn Colvin and Mary
Chapin Carpenter covered the song and when Colvin met Brown afterward, she was
anxious to know what he had thought about it.
“Is she [Carpenter] saying, “like a Buddhist breathing?” he asked her,
referencing another lyric in the song. When
Colvin confirmed that she was, he replied, “Well, it’s supposed to be ‘like a Buddhist
bleeding.’” Colvin retold the story in
an interview after that meeting and said, “So we got that wrong, but I’m glad
we said ‘breathing.’” Maybe she had
heard what she needed to hear as part of her own cool remove from something in
her life. Or maybe it was just a mistake
that someone else needed to hear. Her
and Carpenter’s cover is the first version of the song that I heard, and I’m
glad they said ‘breathing’ too.
Because just
like love and loss, grieving and breathing are inextricably intertwined. Without release, grief gets stuck in the fibers
of our bodies in much the same way we hold our breath too long when we are
anxious; or the way we psychically force tears back into the deepest recesses
of our foreheads when we are too proud to just let them fall. The arts give us cover to cry, to exhale, to
grieve. And it does all of that without
ever giving us away. We get to rewrite
or repaint an artist’s work and fit it into our own narrative; to spill it onto
the canvas of our own lives. Whatever
hurt you are feeling, I guarantee there is a painting to frame it or a song to
give voice to it or a dance to help you, if even for a moment, soar above it. Unhealthy behaviors in response to loss, from isolation to addiction, tend to wall us off even further and keep us in a perpetual state of grieving. The arts are not a wall but rather a cushion; an access point to deeper
pain waiting to be unraveled when we are strong enough. I’m so lucky that I have had Homer, and
Diane Keaton, and Shawn Colvin, and the countless other artists who have provided such
soft landings for my pain through the years.
Even when my heart wasn’t ready to heal, they at least helped me keep it
open.
I do have that
Homer canvas hanging prominently on my wall, and I’m glad that I can still see
in it the mother and child I saw all those years ago. But I’m glad that I now also see the two ladies
dancing. I can see both joy and struggle
– the full arc of a life. I wish that
for myself and for everyone. No life deserves anything less.
--
*If you or
someone you know is feeling overwhelmed by grief, and not currently under
medical care, please start by contacting the National Mental Healthline which
can be reached by calling or texting 988.
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