eCREATIVE
What have you learned about yourself as you have moved through the grief process?
TB: I found that I needed creative pursuits to keep my balance, work through the grief,
and turn off my analytical mind. I can’t draw worth a hoot but I like playing with other
mediums and dabble in pottery, collage, and paint. I processed a lot through writing
and photography.
My misconception was that I had to stop having a relationship with Ken when he died.
What I figured out is that he’s not here in his physical body, but I still have memories,
the ability to re-member - to bring him into membership in the family with us. Loss
breaks the picture of your identity. I had to figure out what was him, what was just me,
and creativity helped me to do that.
For example, Ken and I went to national parks together so I had to figure out if that was
still something I wanted to do. I call them quests now. I go and use the camera that
Ken, a professional landscape photographer, used. When I come back I take the
photographs into the digital darkroom and transform them artistically. I learned that
using creativity in different ways was really important for me to deal with my own
grief. Creativity has offered me a way to be with the grief without trying to fix it.
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What are the challenges of your work as a grief educator?
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TB: One challenge is people saying ‘I’m not creative.’ I remind them ‘it’s about the
process not the product.’ They are using creative tools to figure out what they’re
feeling about their feelings. Sometimes there is some underlying shame about the way
they’re dealing with a loss and the way they’re reacting or not reacting. Because of
oppressive grief stories we have been told - like the five stages - they may feel they are
not doing it right and we have to work though shame messages sometimes. For this
reason, when working with clients, I often start with a tool called The Big Book of Grief