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 advan...