Keep Your Heart Open

Imbolc Lessons in Creativity and Grief, Post Hamnet.

I was five when my maternal Grandmother died. We had lived with her for the last year of her life, and watched her slow, brave decline. I can’t remember the last day of her life, but I remember very clearly arguing with my best friend on the day that she died, at the closed door of the sitting room which had become her bedroom and where her body was laid out. He was entirely sure that when you die, you disappear, entirely, physically, in every sense. I remember trying to get him to peek through the keyhole of the door, so that he could see what I knew to be true, that her body was still there, that she was still there. We weren’t allowed to see her in death, were considered too young to go to the funeral. I remember the fury, the five year old rage that everyone else was getting to say goodbye to this rock of a woman who I loved so dearly, but I was not. Their grief swallowed up in tradition, and mine, inconsequential. The wondering of what you become when you are gone. Five year old me, musing the greatest question of them all.

I am recalling this as we sit on a number 11 bus to town. It is raining, and we are on our way to see Hamnet. I’m stealing myself for an afternoon of tears, carrying all the losses of my life along with me, and knowing they will show their faces to me in the next few hours. I’ve been seeing negative reviews of this film for days, people calling it “grief porn” and using critical language to describe the reactions of cinema go-ers letting their tears flow in a room with strangers, but not out in “the real world”. Critics who have decided the sole purpose of the film is to make us cry. I decided to stop reading them, when I realized that they speak of a time when grief expressed outwardly into the arms of the world carried too much shame, a heavy holding of cowardice, a lack of bravery. You are not courageous enough to just weather the storm and get on with living, they say. You are not strong enough to hold your emotions IN. You must stay polite, repressed, and not bother the world with your sorrow. Pah, I think. Grief and I are old friends. I am ready for this.

As the windscreen wipers on our double decker bus squeak, clearing the rain that is heaving out of the sky on this grim and gray January day, I see grief as the storm that touches every face, and stories of loss as a meaningful way of sharing the truth of endings. And for me, the core of my creativity. What would I be without it? What work would I have created without the storm? People talk about art as escape, as a portal out of the challenges of the real world. But I’ve always felt it to be an intrinsic part of my life, what makes me, me, a means to explore my inner worlds and process them. Would I still have been as I am, without the journey of grief?

Three hours later, we step out of the cinema, the last remaining newsreel cinema in the UK, in a daze. The lights and noise of the city overwhelming, clashing with the intense, brilliant, creative, devastating and, yes, joyful story we have just been part of. The brightness glares after 2 hours of moss and tree trunk and soil and sky, intertwining through the lives of people now immortalised in literature. It’s the first time that I have seen any story told of Shakespeare where he is not centered. But we don’t even hear his name spoke by anyone until almost the end of the film. All the scenes that have moved me most, are each carried by women, their strength and wild femininity vibrating from the screen. Agnes reaching her hands towards the boy who is the vision of her son, grown. Mary Shakespeare speaking on the frailty of life, the threads that bind us to our children, and how we must never, ever take those threads of connection for granted. Judith, sitting with her dead brother, observing that he is not there, that this shell of a body before her is no longer her brother. Her grief held. Witnessed. Allowed.

It was Imbolc when my little brother died. He was 7 and I was 17. And I remember being taken in to see him, in his put-up bed in mum and dad’s room. He could have been asleep, amongst his teddies and favorite blankets. Neatly laid out in his best pyjamas. But I knew he wasn’t, because he no longer looked like himself. He was gone.

And yet, the stories of his seven small years let him live, in a different way, even now.

After he died, I spent a lot of time painting. At home, mostly, but also for local theatre productions. At school, I painted a forest, on the back wall of the stage - deep and dark, and I remember wanting to make it so that the audience would feel like they were in it, could walk into it and be lost. Free. Uncontained. That they might also be swept up in leaf and branch and the brush strokes of my sorrow.

Photograph credit: Fiona Crombie, Production Designer, Hamnet. Backdrop painted by Scenic Artist Rohan Harris.

Imbolc is the time where the land is still mourning the loss of life and summer, while also telling the story that in all endings, are beginnings, and in the depths of the sorrow, the soil is already renewing. Loss is part of the story of our lives, as tree is to soil, and as leaf is to wind. It is the ocean we reach into to create, and the sky we string our tiny stars of existence to. As we walk to our favorite bookshop cafe, to sit and process this incredible story, I am reminded that art is not about escape, but about telling the story of something that has moved us, a joy, a sorrow, an anger, a kindness. Something we want to carry forward, to live on, to be held by the world.

Creativity for me has always been about carving out spaces for the experiences of life to be held, revealed, shared, explored, witnessed. Allowing us, in the process, to lean into all that it is that makes us human. Love and grief are two sides of the same coin, a weight in our pockets, that life gives the power to be flipped at a moments notice.

I loved this film, and the conversations it has sparked around creativity and loss. It felt so important to see it so close to my brother’s anniversary, and with my children, who are no strangers to grief. It felt important to be in that room, with my children, and all these people we didn’t know, sharing an experience of loss, crying and releasing sadness. Letting our children see that grief is a part of our lives, and essential to honor and hold, that it makes way for creativity, expression, new life, feels like cycle breaking. We fear grief, we don’t want to have to experience it, but there is such beauty to be found when we walk with it and when we let the stories flow from it.

This Imbolc, I am walking with grief, and creativity, and knowing that two things which feel opposite can both be true at the same time. It is true in the end, that we disappear, and that we do not. We return to the earth, and, if we are lucky, we also stay. In stories and memories and the things that we create. That we are always part of the life of the world, not separate from it, and that being “gone” is only that the energy that shaped us, is busy shaping something else now. A tree, a hillside, the flight of a bird, a song.

I have spent the evening painting - yellow squares of sunshine. My gran’s kitchen, my brother’s golden hair, my eldest daughter’s favorite colour, the legs of the hawk Smallest is colouring, the winter sunshine that will rise again tomorrow over the tree tops in bright remembrance of summer, telling it’s story of all that is to come and all that will be and all that has been. Spring is not here quite yet, but she is on her way.

Love, Kate

P.S. I found this poem, by Mary Oliver, and want to share it with you today. Its called Sleeping In The Forest.

You can read my thoughts on Imbolc from my last 2 years on Substack here:

All That Imbolc Brings - 2025

The Truth About My Creative Journey - 2024