This commentary of Maduro’s “In Defense of Illusion: Creative Agency, or the Imagination, in the Tolerance of Existential Anxiety and Grief” underscores the role of creative imagination in confronting enduring traumatic loss. It argues for the possibility of achieving the paradox of holding and living in simultaneously a kind of hope and dread in which one’s life, and perhaps one’s culture, has been destroyed, on one hand, and in which one’s sense of one’s future life might be reimbued with purpose, value, and a wish to live, on the other hand.