Stay in your lane

I started a post yesterday about art, and got sidetracked by my multimillion dollar idea (don’t steal it). So back to pontifications about art.

The reason I got sidetracked was because beautiful words or beautiful images are basically all that the art forms provide us... it may be someone’s personal way of dealing with grief, and yet what is produced is often something that helps perpetuate this glossing over of grief in our society. Even Hamlet uses a euphemism right in the middle of a grand monologue (is that the first use of ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’? I wonder...) 

And though songs may convey beautiful messages, it’s not like we’re going to make our clients or donors a mix tape to demonstrate our empathy.

In a blog post by Megan Devine (grief activist and writer, author of “It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok”) she writes that the thing about art is that can help us feel seen in our own grief: “Being seen inside the truth of your own story, being allowed to tell your own story - that’s where the healing lies” So maybe it's not such a bad thing that this is one of the only ways we actually talk about death.

Maybe art can be healing for those who are grieving. But I think it can also easily backfire.

So the hitching point for professionals is this: without relying solely on art forms, beautiful words, greeting cards with flowing script and pictures of flowers, how on earth do we bare witness to our clients/donors/populations we serve without giving in to society’s norms. 

Is there a professionally appropriate way to stay in our lane (stay within the relationship expected as professional/client without overstepping a boundary) while not playing into the tired ‘same old’? Or maybe reliance on the comfortable art forms, the traditional images are the only appropriate avenue we have.

Like the fire yesterday at Notre-Dame, that thought just makes me sad. A loss of history mirrored by the loss of the possibility to acknowledge new ways forward.