Excerpt from The Way Men Heal 4: The Masculine Healing Actions-Creativity-Eric Clapton

Creative Actions

Music Composition

There are composers who wrote symphonies dedicated to a friend or loved one who had died. Music is a powerful way of using creative activities to resonate the grief within a safe place of action. Doing this repeatedly moves men closer towards a place of transformation.

Eric Clapton

Musician Eric Clapton's four-year-old son Conor died in a tragic accident in 1991. Clapton at the time was two years sober and was sent into the extreme chaos of experiencing the death of his young child. He describes this time in his autobiography as a "waking nightmare." Clapton then tells us what he did after the death: He went to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and secluded himself and played his guitar. Here's a quote from his book14: "Many people felt that it was not good for me to be

alone but I had AA and I had my guitar. It was, as it always had been, my salvation. Over the next 3 months I stayed alone, going to meetings and playing the guitar. To begin with I played with no objectives, then songs began to evolve." Clapton describes the process of the evolution of three songs during this time: Tears in Heaven, My Father's Eyes and The Circus Left Town. As the songs evolved he talks of playing them and singing them repeatedly, over and over as they became more and more refined.

Each of these three songs had to do with an aspect of his son's death. Tears in Heaven is about the question of whether we may meet again after death, My Father's Eyes is about Clapton's gratefulness to his son for allowing him to see his father's eyes in his son's eyes. The third song was directly about his grief for his son, Conor. The Circus Left Town was about the night before Conor's death when Clapton took his son to the circus. The song describes the intense sadness of that trip having to last his son a lifetime. This last song is a powerful expression of sadness and I am sure that most people who know this story won't be able to make it through the song without shedding a tear. You can hear it on youtube here

Clapton was asked in an interview "Was that the toughest song you ever wrote or did it just come out?” He responded: “The writing of the song is the therapy. The toughness is doing nothing.” “From the time where everyone said goodbye to one another at the funeral and I was left at home — from that time to the time the song was finished, it was harder if I didn’t play the guitar. Playing the guitar was actually the solution.” It is easy to see from Clapton's experience that he used his creative action of playing and writing the songs as a means to privately re-experience his story, over and over. Each time he picked up his guitar and started playing he was remembering Conor and was experiencing the story of the loss. Each time he remembered Conor he was in the midst of his profound feelings of loss. In doing this he was using his creative action as a means to tell his story. Not unlike another person using their interaction to tell their story to a friend or to a group. It’s hard to imagine he could play the guitar and work on those songs without feeling the emotions of his loss. They were a tool to move him directly into it but with the safety of his guitar and his strength of songwriting. He had the courage to experience those things over and over, and through this action he obviously told his story in his own mind and in so doing he slowly inched himself closer to a place of healing.

Keep in mind that very few people were aware of the healing nature of Clapton's songwriting after Conor's death. He didn't tell people or make a big deal of it. This is typical of the men who find active ways to tell their story of their grief. We simply don't see it unless we ask.

Sculpting

I once worked with a man who experienced the death of his mother when he was a child. After his mother’s death his father took a block of walnut and placed it on the dining room table. The father proceeded to carve a bust of his mother. Imagine what it would be like as a child to see your mother, who had just died, start to appear on the dining room table. It’s easy to see that the children would sense their father’s love for their mother as the bust was coming to life. It’s also easy to see that simply having that carving on the table made the topic of mom’s death something that was permissible to discuss. Things were on the table. (a photo of this carving is on the front cover)

Listening to Music

Abraham Lincoln had a great deal of grief in his life and in his time as president of the United States. Lincoln had some interesting ways to handle this. One was a male friend who would come to the White House and go with Lincoln to a room that had a piano. The man would sit and play what Lincoln called “sad songs.” As he played Lincoln would sit and cry. Lincoln was using a creative action, the songs, as a means to move into his feelings of loss. He had found a way to release his pain a bit at a time via the action of these meetings.

How many of us do something similar? So often I have known both men and women who link their grief to a song. One man I know says that all he has to do is hear the song Amazing Grace and his tears start flowing. For others the songs are different but the impact is very similar. Through the creative action of listening we palpate our feelings of loss and in this way are able to take a little bit at a time.

Playing Music

The story is told of Ludwig Von Beethoven15 and a dear friend who was a Baroness. It seems the Baroness experienced the death of her children in a tragic accident. She sat motionless for days. Beethoven was a close friend but refused to go and visit her, telling friends that he was so overcome with grief for her that he needed to grieve himself in private. Some time after, Beethoven invited the Baroness to his home. Her friends were amazed that she actually accepted. Beethoven invited her in and she sat in his music room. Beethoven proceeded for over an hour to play numerous songs with great passion and feeling. It is said that when he finished she left without a word. It was reported that years later she said: “He told me everything with his music and at last brought me comfort.” Beethoven realized his music could convey something that his words could not. He obviously used his music to process his own grief and also as a means to bring compassion and understanding to his friend. He was using his actions to connect with his story and both experience and convey his emotions. This is the masculine side of grief.

Quilting

The AIDS Quilt is another example of using creative action in dealing with grief. When the Gay community was overrun by deaths due to AIDS they found a creative action that helped in telling the story. They created a huge quilt. Each panel of the quilt tells the story of the person who died of the disease. Massed together it is a powerful sight and memorial to those who died. Each panel of the quilt intimately told the story about one of the persons who died from AIDS. It is easy to imagine making such a quilt panel and remembering the person and your grief for them as you worked. It’s also easy to imagine that as people worked together on each panel they would tell stories about the person who died, not unlike the way we told stories about my dad when we made a box for his ashes. Since the AIDS quilt the idea of using quilts has become popular as a means to tell the story of grief in many different situations including 9-11 memorials and many others. 

The Way Men Heal on Amazon