It has been a year since my last blog input. Sometimes life just gets away from you.
Life imitates art.
Tuesday was one of those days. A week ago
I was facilitating a professional development workshop for the NYC Department
of Education. The people participating were teachers of elementary school
children. The theme of our workshop was “Grief and Empathy” through the lens of
a famous dance “Lamentation” by Martha Graham. Not an easy topic to approach
with elementary school children. We were exploring how to teach metaphor and
abstraction to 3rd through 5th graders. During the
workshop we learned excerpts from the piece. Graham’s intent was to embody
grief, to become grief, to get inside the emotion and live it not just imitate
it. In the process of learning and doing I really felt like I had a deeper
understanding of grief and empathy.
Exactly a week later my brother-in-law had a massive heart
attack as he was waking up. After contacting 911, my sister attempted to
administer CPR. He did not survive. By 8am people were trying to get in touch
with me to let me know what occurred. By 12:30 I was leaving school and driving
to Connecticut to pick up my nephew from college and drive him back down to
South Jersey. We arrived in the evening to a house full of people stopping by
to offer condolences. When things are so public grief takes on a certain form.
It is almost polite. Visitations from empathetic people allows one to relive
the grief but also relive the memories before the grief. One
imagines “what if” as one is remembering “what was”. As Joan Didion wrote one
enters the realm of “magical thinking” where all things are possible if I just
did one thing differently. This is good and of course unrealistic or “magical”
and somewhat necessary as one tries to make sense of such
finality.
However I think what Graham was after was something more
personal. It is what one experiences when one is alone at night, when the pain
of the loss is so great and you feel your heat ache so strongly, as if someone
has reached inside you and ripped it right out and you are not sure whether you
are scared, sad, angry, exhausted, or all of that rolled into one total
expression of grief. The grief and the empathy that happens in the middle of
the night when you hear your sister sobbing, alone and afraid and you go to
her and let her know that you care and that she can just let it out because you
will be there for her to do so.
The first dance that I created to be shown professionally
was after my father had died. His death propelled me to officially enter the
artistic world as a choreographer. My dad was 56, I was 26. The piece, “Passing
On” was about transitioning from this world to whatever lies beyond. 25 years
later when I was devastated by my mother’s death I created a piece, “Margaret’s
Lament”. This time not about transition but about devastation. One artist’s
attempt to make sense of, to understand, and to express such strong and
powerful emotions.
Grief is here, it is with us everyday, it crops up out of
nowhere and sometimes takes us over when we least expect it. We have all
experienced it in some form and when we see it in others and recognize it we
show our humanity and capacity for empathy, compassion, and understanding. The
past three days have put me in that place again and all of the emotions and
feelings surrounding grief and empathy are right there on the surface.
So was learning “Lamentation” a preparation for this week’s
events. Does “life imitate art” and/or “art imitate life”. Or through the lens
of the artist isn’t it all life.
