I’ve been thinking about this topic and was so glad to find it here, thank you to all the stories and perspectives above.
my mother died nearly 5 years ago, and at the time I was finishing my last year of college. The transitions of her loss, and then moving back to the house she used to live in, full of visceral absence, created a broiler plate of emotions that pushed me to find/redefine my creative voice. here’s a poem from seamus heaney that i read at her funeral - from “clearances” which he wrote after his mother’s passing:
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
recently, about 2 weeks ago, i lost a peer and collaborator very suddenly and surprisingly. she was an actor and filmmaker whose brilliance I always marveled at and who had parts written for her in every one of my scripts. it feels like a deeply traumatizing loss to my little community of filmmakers, but I also have deep feelings of guilt for even thinking about the creative loss when her mother is grieving her only daughter.
i’ve always found the way these things affect me strange and unexpected - such that I look back on the time after my mother died and can understand what I was going thru in retrospect much more than I could at the time. it spurned a creative burst, but it certainly didn’t make me feel productive at the time.
in light of the recent loss of mike mcgrath (who I didn’t know personally), nipsey hussle, lyra mckee, the bombings in sri lankai i thought this might be a good topic to bump. i think the recent death of my friend has made these more “public” deaths feel much deeper to me. I’ve hardly had a day off from work since my friends passing, and I know I tend to need time and space alone to deal with these things, but I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by loss and death recently. Perhaps it will turn into something creative that can pay tribute to these great losses, but for now it doesn’t feel like there’s any fertile ground.
here’s some more Seamus Heaney from “Doubletake”, a poem which talks mostly about history and injustice, but the ending bit feels relevant here to the feelings I’m having:
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there’s fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
