The Art of Losing Well
How Creating Helps Us Make Space for Grief
Where can I be / That I will not find loss?
- Miguel Hernandez
Early in lockdown, when the bookshops and libraries were shut, I ordered a small stack of used books online. Like many, I was looking for entertainment and distraction. Art can be a great escape from the serious business of life.
Yet somehow within my selection, I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion — a non-fiction account of the fragmented moments and memories that made up the year following husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death. Not exactly a read you’d choose to help you get away from the emotions of 2020.
I chose it because I’d come across her writing in fragments and wanted to read something from her fully. It’s still perhaps a strange thing to seek out writing about loss and grief.
But as much as art can help us escape, it is also a way that we process, understand, and connect to one another across the full, rich, complicated, difficult spectrum of human experience.
Indeed, a function of art identified by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in In Art as Therapy is sorrow: “One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is teach us how to suffer more…
