In March of 1990, Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose. What does this have to do with my Campfire Conversation with Chiara Liberatore? Stay with me for a bit.
Andrew was 24 and the frontman of an up-and-coming Seattle band called Mother Love Bone. Their first full album, Apple, hadn’t even come out yet. It’s an amazing album! And it makes me wonder what they would have done if he hadn’t died.
Chris Cornell, the lead singer of Soundgarden, was his old roommate and good friend. The loss hit him hard. So, he did what was natural for him to process the grief. He created something. The grief flowed into songs. He reached out to two of Andrew’s bandmates, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, about recording them as a tribute. The songs turned into a whole album. They called it Temple of the Dog.
Gossard and Ament had just started a new band. Their new singer was a shy guy from San Diego who happened to be around the studio when they were recording. He ended up singing on one of those songs, “Hunger Strike.” His name is Eddie Vedder. That new band became Pearl Jam.
I’m not saying in any way that losing Andrew Wood was a good thing. It was tragic and many people felt deep pain. And at the same time, the loss and grieving flowed into the creation of something new. Temple of the Dog. Pearl Jam. Music that has touched millions of people, including me.
In many ways, the story of Andrew Wood, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, and Pearl Jam parallels my Campfire Conversation with Chiara Liberatore. When I listened back to the conversation, I noticed how often Chiara talked about grief like water. Let it wash through. It gets clogged up. Let it metabolize.
It made me think of what Lynne Twist says in The Soul of Money. She says money is a lot like water. When it flows, it cleanses and nurtures and helps things grow. When it gets held and stagnant, it turns toxic. I’ve started to think love and grief work the same way. They might not be separate things at all, more like two sides of the same coin. Grief just might be love flowing after a loss. When Andrew Wood died, the love Chris Cornell had for his friend didn’t stop. It flowed into songs.
My conversation with Chiara was a little bit different than my other Campfire Conversations. You may notice it when you listen. I talked more than I normally do. I was processing a lot at the time, and it was all coming together as our conversation went in many different directions. We kept reaching conclusions together, out loud. And by the end we had circled back around to something that feels fundamental to what it means to be human.
We create. We lose. We grieve. And we create again. It’s a constant cycle of creation and destruction. And grieving often goes hand in hand with creation. So, if we deny the grief, the circle of creation can get broken.
Chiara is a co-founder and co-executive director of Maine Inside Out. They bring together young people and adults who’ve been impacted by prison and the justice system to create and perform original theater. She’s been doing this kind of work for about 30 years.
We met because of a paternity leave. About a year ago, I had gotten connected with someone else at Maine Inside Out. This past March, I reached out to tell him about the FROM WITHIN art show. He was out with his new baby, so the email landed in Chiara’s inbox. She wrote back and basically said, this is amazing, we should talk. Our first conversation was on video while I was still in Costa Rica. We met in person when I got back to Maine. Not long after, I was invited to join the Maine Inside Out board, which I now serve on.
When I asked Chiara what love means to her, she said presence.
“Love is like this opening of presence that allows us to actually feel the connection that is already there and to enjoy it and to be with.”
A few minutes later, we were talking about grief, and she reached for the same word.
“To be with grief or to accompany someone who is in deep grief requires presence. And I think that when we can do that together, especially, and witness one another and share in grief, then creation happens.”
Love and grief ask the same thing of us. Show up and be with it. And when grief gets that kind of presence, it moves.
“So much is possible when we really can let the grief wash through. Wash through our bodies, wash through us.”
Most of us were never taught to let it. Some losses are big, like losing a friend or family member. Some are quieter. My body doesn’t let me do what it used to, and I’ve had to say goodbye to thinking of myself as a hardcore runner. That’s a loss most of us would never call grief. So we hold onto it. Chiara thinks we’ve been trained to.
“The conditioning of modernity and capitalism makes us think we have to keep everything. So grief is about letting go and letting it wash through and letting it metabolize... And so we’ve been trained to not do that. And I would say it’s making us sick.”
That’s the stagnant water. Pearl Jam has a line for it in “I Am Mine”: “The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow is denied.” Chiara sees it in prisons, too, where punishment is supposed to bring healing and so often blocks the grief that healing needs.
Earlier in the conversation, Chiara had told me she feels most alive when she’s creating. Later, she came back to it.
“I’m realizing another moment when I feel most alive is in deep grief, either for myself or when I’m with someone else in deep grief. It brings right back to the source.”
Creating and grieving. I think both are love moving. We only grieve something we love. And when we let the grief keep flowing, it often turns into something new. For Chris Cornell, it turned into songs. For the men who paint for FROM WITHIN, it turns into paintings. For the people Maine Inside Out works with, it turns into original theater built from their own stories.
At the end, I asked Chiara what fires we need to tend right now.
“I think we need to be grieving. There’s a lot to grieve right now. ... I think we have to grieve and celebrate in ceremony together around the fire, whatever that looks like. We need to story tell.”
Andrew Wood never got to hear Temple of the Dog. He never heard Pearl Jam. But he’s a significant part of all of it. When he died, the love his friends had for him didn’t stop. And they let their grief flow. It flowed into songs, into a new band, and out to millions of people like me who have been positively impacted by it all.
I believe that’s what grief does when we let it move. It keeps love flowing long after the loss. And that flowing love can often lead to the creation of new and beautiful things.
It makes me curious about what else is in my own life because someone, somewhere, let their grief flow. And what I’m holding onto that hasn’t been allowed to move yet. What creations may be stagnant in me because I haven’t let some grief and love flow?
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This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.
