Grief: Music can help you heal

You can write it, perform it, listen to it but there is no denying that music can heal a battered soul.

It turns out music is connected to the pleasure center of our brains and is a great coping tool because it allows us to release feel-good neurotransmitters without resorting to booze, pints of ice cream, or shopping till we drop.

When grief renders words inadequate, music gives a voice to overwhelming visceral emotion.

Sad songs make us feel less alone, happy songs elevate our mood. My son, Charles, used writing and performing rap to help him through his mental illness and thoughts of suicide. And if the addiction had not complicated his depression, I do believe that strategy would have carried him through as it had for many years.  

Writing and performing music is a way of expressing yourself creatively that can help you work through the pain of loss. Judy Collins’ “Wings Of Angels,” is a song she wrote as a tribute to her son Clark, who died by suicide in 1992. “Tears in Heaven” is a ballad written by Eric Clapton and Will Jennings about the pain Clapton felt following the death of his four-year-old son, Conor, who fell from a window of the 53rd-floor New York apartment in 1991.

We add music to our funerals and to serenade our sadness. Sometimes it celebrates our beloved dead, offering comfort for the grief-stricken; sometimes it confronts us with the anguish of mortality and loss or reflects the painful, complex and laborious task of mourning.

Mother pours grief into ‘Claire’s Song’