You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma.

  You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma.

“We have art so that we do not perish because of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power

Or, we have art so we can turn sometimes awful truths into new and even joyful life, a dialectic we can enact in 

our own experiences.  

This is my new understanding of how I have dealt with big trauma by turning to art. I address the personal loss 

and tragedy in my wife Karen’s stroke and her survival and how writing, my artistic outlet, gave me surprising joy. 

 And looking back on my brother David’s even more tragic mental illness, art is there too.  I found things that we 

can take from these experiences individually and as a community.  And in the process of looking at all this I’ve 

found others who have turned trauma and tragedy into unexpected joy. 

Lost and Found Connections

In early 2001 Karen was working at Northwest Airlines and we took advantage of free flight benefits for a long 

weekend in Paris. It was my first trip to Europe. We flew First Class. I was in the 16th of my nearly forty years at 

Legal Aid in Minneapolis. A friend was staying with our high school aged daughter and son. We were settling 

ourselves at a hotel on the Left Bank in Paris that first afternoon, looking out over the lowrise buildings and 

unpacking. Karen pulled out some francs to count and in a second, froze, dropping them and collapsing on the

 bed. This was the beginning of our personal devastations, revolutions and recoveries. It was a very severe stroke

 caused by a carotid dissection.  We were 47. She was hospitalized for a month there and later, another month in 

St. Paul.

I did my first-ever creative writing soon after Karen's stroke.  There are some rather thudding poems. 

Then over two years I wrote Lost and Found Connections in Paris, a fifty page essay.  It describes the actual 

experience of the stroke, the treatment, recovery, plus medical science.  I cover a trans-Atlantic Lear Jet flight, 

medical and family histories, the City of Paris, art, walks, strangers and much more. So, rather than dwelling s

olely in a world of loss and pain, my reaction to trauma included approaching the experience from many 

dimensions and discoveries. What were these?  They included:

• Researching what is a stroke? What is TPA, the clot buster drug which coincidently, my brother 

  Phil helped design the biomedical production? Treatments and prognoses, of course. Botox for

   spasm and contracture relief. Phil also worked with Botox production. 

• Delving into the geographic and historical context. Did my eight times-great grandmother, 

  Jeanne Facheux LeDuc (a forced immigrant to Quebec) stay in one of the twelve historically 

  preserved cells for sick women, for vagabonds and beggars (Les Filles de Roi), still sited on the

   grounds of Karen’s Paris hospital, L’Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere?  

• Yes, it's true: Freud, James, Charcot, Binet and others who invented neurology, they all studied,

   experimented, and wrote right there. Louis XIV commissioned some of those clinics still 

  standing on the campus. 

• The beds were all hand-cranked and every clinic patient was charged the same per diem.

• Personal connections.  As brief as a two minute conversation with a Parisian woman on a late

   night subway ride about our shared tragedies in that hospital. With Karen whose first post-stroke

   sentence she wrote out: “je voudrais brosser mes dentes.” (I want to brush my teeth.). Dreadful

   and then better phone calls with our immediate family. Help from friends, colleagues, relatives, 

  friends’ families, and others, not to mention the medical staff. Donation of sick leave from new 

  colleagues at the airline. “We got you covered.” from my long-time and new Legal Aid colleagues.

• Taking in the pleasures of the Louvre, the Seine, the cafes, Musee Carnavalet, a service at 

  Notre Dame, the Bibliotech Nationalle, and the streets of the city. Van Gogh, wine cheaper than 

  Coke at cafes. A Jules Verne store - “seulement (only)Jules Verne.”

• A hospital aide who loved the movie, The Straight Story. I secured for her a signed photo from 

  Legal Aid’s very, very handsome eighty year old part-time secretary, and regular bit player, 

  Wiley Harker. He’s a good looking old cuss in a brief bar scene.

It is a very wide-ranging thing that reveals me mainly processing intellectually, but also, now that I look back on it,

 responding in multiple ways and building a process of healing that took place amidship the devastation. This 

creation of written art was, to some degree, a useful diversion, but it has also been the means of partial 

transformation of tragedy into joy.

Tragedy to Joy

I think these are the key features of building that process of healing: 

• new learning, 

• thinking about those new things and about my existing life

• uncovering connections, 

• building it all into a coherent story, and 

• getting it all out into writing. 

It would have had a very different content had the tragic circumstances been much worse and our relatively 

abundant resources lacking, but the learning, the considering, the explorations and the writing were powerful, 

powerful forces at work. 

So what is the result?  Doing this work, in its many scattered parts, buffered me and allowed me to create 

understanding, perspective and I still find it hard to believe, even pleasure out of a situation otherwise dominated 

by pain.  

I now understand, the excitement of discovery and creation are, for me, incompatible with depression. 

Diversion from trauma, especially diversion into creative spheres, is a great thing. But it is through more than 

just creating a diversion that we can healthily respond to trauma.

Organized religions provide buffers against trauma, buffers made of preset understandings for those who believe. 

As well as rituals, which, if not always pleasurable, provide activity through which trauma is processed and 

transformed into physical activity, into speech and song, into collective social activity. Ritual, I note, is a missing 

aspect of my experience. 

We know that expressing, describing and vanquishing trauma through music is the essence of the blues. And of 

course, you don’t have to sing the blues. If you listen closely you will find pleasure and may even improve parts 

of your life through music.. And now I understand that creating and singing the blues have to be very powerful 

means of transforming trauma into beauty, into humor, into collective memory. I don’t sing, but I do listen. 

I now think that the pain, the fear, the guilt, the devastation, the loss, the shock and other emotions can be 

transformed, off-loaded, aestheticized, displayed, covered, colored, broadened, turned into objects of mystery and

 subjects of  investigation and  made into life lessons. Not erased. But when so reborn, these very reactions to and 

understandings of trauma and its wide context can all be shared and yes, even safely and beneficially preserved.  

Learning and exploring and speculating on all these things - all this took me out of pure tragedy, out of only 

simply mourning our losses. And so I wrote. And wrote. That long essay. Some poor poetry. And I still do.

Imagined Joy

I found another example of tragedy and art in my life.  My brother David, born with a palsy, then later lived with 

severe and unremitting schizophrenia for 40 years. I’ve tried to imagine that he had some joy in inner life as we 

could see so little joy in life when we were with him. I got something out of it…. Or put something into it when I 

wrote this.

Nabokov Knows My Brother

When with close listening

We draw meaning

From disarticulation,

His constricted life expands

And rolls along in curves and cuts  

As alluvial streams trace through

The silting out 

Of memories and plans,

Of Bond movies watched on DVD, 

The nightly news of ’76, 

His two flights west

And Alice Cooper lyrics. 

Broken twigs and latticed leaves tumble loose 

Pressured by his very certain reveries

Of hard-edged, dark unbounded efficacy. 

Today:   His guilty premonition 

Of the oil train explosion,  

A smoldering conspiracy,  

Just across the border.

This tragedy rises, not 

From a loss of meaning,

But in the raging 

Floods of consequence.

David fantasized about running away to Canada and started walking the 60 km towards the border at least once. 

He was self-isolated in a small long-term care home, 20 km from the border in a beautiful setting.  David refused 

to leave the place with any family members or staff  for years, unless trundled into an ambulance.  He was often 

angry to see us and his various congenital speech problems and mental illness made communication difficult.  I see

 that writing that poem was also  a small abstraction of  tragedy into something else. Into art.  David died in 2022.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about parents caring for their schizophrenic son and “referential mania” where the son

excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent 

than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to

 each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in-most thoughts 

are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks

 form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher

 and of everything he is the theme.   

V. Nabokov, Symbols and Signs, The New Yorker, May 15, 1948.     

Nabokov must have known someone with that illness and, if so, the writing and reading about it may have been 

transformative. The actual experience of the illness and the caretaking are so stressful and often ugly - to have 

provided such beauty in describing referential mania is amazing. Somehow, he seems to have known my brother.

And putting these many aspects of tragedy into words and reworking the telling was, as it turns out, my therapy. 

Indeed, most important to living with and not being defeated by this trauma is the fact that there is true joy in 

learning, assimilating and writing about these parts of life. For me.

And so art, my creative writing, is my opiate (c.f. Karl Marx) and my blues.  And so art is a big reason that that 

loss, Karen’s stroke, is a part of and not the end of, the consequential and good lives we have since lived.  

Discovering Others

I find now that others have found their way to create joy in place of trauma. In the past year, as Minnesotans found

 a hundred ways to resist the violent and unlawful actions of the Trump administration against people alleged to be

 in the U.S. illegally and their protectors, the Singing Resistance was born. At least fifteen groups of people 

combining politics and vocal  art were formed throughout Minnesota and are found around the world. 

The Resistance confronted masked and armed troops with song and walked through terrorized neighborhoods 

singing songs of encouragement: “We get there together or never get there at all,” “We won’t let fear divide us,”

“Hold on, my dear ones.”  Like the blues and like my writing, The Singing Resistance transforms trauma into 

positive experience and joy and a much improved ability to meet the next challenge.  

My friend Peter Kramer, architect,  touches on some of these ideas in his coloring books:  Color Your Way to

 Mental Health  (Mailing address now 156 Delos St. W., St. Paul 55107). He promises: 

Research has shown that coloring reinforces and energizes your hand-to-eye-to-brain connections, 

builds syncrasy, provides a milieu for repetitive non-threatening decision making, encourages focused

 attention to a specific task, and produces a tangible end product. Think of coloring as talking to paper

 with color as your language...It's therapy. Our coloring books will help you develop a positive self-image,

 self- confidence, and a healthy mental attitude…. Coloring is a metronome that will naturally melt away

 stress, level anxiety, reach into your subconscious unblocking old memories, and balance your head, your

 hand and your heart. 

 A Belgian friend, Pierre Mertens, shows several examples of transformation in his book, Bare Together: Where 

Psychotherapy, International Solidarity and Art Meet, (get it via Amazon/Kindle).  Pierre relates his family’s 

tragedy and triumphs, his work in psychotherapy and art and how he has led international efforts to support

 families dealing with severe disabilities. For decades, he and the tiny organizations he’s led, have partnered with

 families in poor nations around the world to build intimate and critical, and very local supports for families of

 children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. Proper bowel care saves lives! 

I wrote to him that I think that Liesje, his daughter who lived 14 years of good life, an exceedingly hard life, with

 a severe spinal cord defect, gave him a wider, more challenging and more rewarding life than he ever would have

 had without her. 

He confirms this: 

What you write about Liesje touches the very core of why this book exists. She indeed opened a wider, 

more demanding, and ultimately more meaningful life than I could ever have imagined without her. 

And he says this about one-to-one caregiving: 

What has become increasingly clear to me is how care itself can be a form of resistance. Resistance 

against a derailed neoliberal logic, that places, efficiency, productivity, and profit above vulnerability. 

Caring, taking time, staying when things become difficult – these are not soft values.

Pierre shows how international collaborators can support actions by ground-level, local people responding to 

health crises often in the midst of economic, cultural, environmental and political challenges. He publishes art 

online almost every day.  Find out more about this international work at https://child-help.international/. 

Dr. Pauline Boss, a Minnesota therapist and teacher, approaches this from another angle in her book: Ambiguous 

Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Harvard University Press, 2000.  Often traumas, or some losses are 

ambiguous because they are not total, not final. Karen lives but some parts of her are lost forever.  Each day can 

remind us of what is lost while we also experience what remains.  But if lucky, if attentive, we can see that the 

loss is accompanied by gain. For example, in Karen’s case, this led to her years of volunteer work to develop 

self-help aphasia groups for survivors, now led by MN Connect Aphasia Now .

Boss writes in a chapter titled: The Benefit of A Doubt: 

...some people use the experience to learn how to live in difficult circumstances throughout life, balancing

 the ability to grieve what is lost with what is still  possible.  Ambiguity can make people less dependent 

on stability and more comfortable with spontaneity and change..…With ambiguous loss, the task is to let 

go, to risk moving forward, even when we do not know exactly where we are going. We move to keep 

from freezing in place or becoming comfortably static and we do so in ways that are life-enhancing. p.135 

Whose life cannot be improved with greater comfort with spontaneity and change?   Exploring the ambiguities of 

loss, of trauma and the surrounding world is what I have done in my writing, without recognizing it until now. 

It took me twenty-five years without a hint of insight to realize that my creative impulse or obsession or play at 

this form of art was a healthy and a healing response. It turns out that it is not just me who misses how this happens.

 

Peter Townshend of The Who told Steven Colbert in March, 2026 that it was not until 1980s when he relaunched  

Tommy in NYC and gave hundreds of interviews, that he was shocked to discover that his rock opera’s story of 

abuse and exultation was strikingly autobiographical. Townshend, throughout his career, writes achingly of abuse, 

acceptingly of gender fluidity, he writes of violence, the call of fame and dangers of fake news, drugs and 

influencers (see Psychoderelict). Townshend  both courts and condemns nihilism and fully embraces the joys of 

rock and roll in his work.  And his guitar playing is inimitable, excitement amplified. As an obviously committed 

fan, I don’t mean any comparison of our creations, only to point out that unrealized, latent power of trauma 

transformed into art, even unknowingly, is a real phenomenon.

CONCLUSION

And I will venture that there are other things that help make a good life alongside trauma, so please consider these: 

• naturally, the love of those sharing in the trauma, 

• physical exercise,

• relationships with as many others as you can manage,

• immersion in nature,

• engagement with the tasks needed for recovery. 

• joining with and learning from others living with trauma; and 

• advocating for policies and engaging in practices that prevent and respond to tragedy.

But, again…. 

And again, for me….

Oh how, even in the wake of tragedy, oh how glorious, how transformative, reading and learning and writing and 

art can be!  

Jay Wilkinson jewilkinsoniii@gmail.com                          

September, 2026  ©