Passage

Passage is an interdisciplinary call-and-response poetry, music, and prose project inspired by grief and created at the height of the pandemic. The project hinges around a single poem written by poet, scholar, and psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer, PhD. Dr. Hamer sent me, a practicing psychologist, cellist, vocalist, and composer, his poem, “Passage,” after I had asked if he had any poems about the ocean—the greatest destroyer, life-giver, and, in many ways, teacher of loss. Hamer's poem spoke deeply to my feelings of grief. Held by his words, I was inspired to create a series of musical pieces. Afterward, I shared the music with him. He was, in turn, touched.

Moved by this experience, I wondered if others would like to feel held in their grief via art and art-making. I decided to invite four psychotherapy colleagues to listen to the project and share their isolated written responses with me. Without their knowing what the others had written, my colleagues' responses fit perfectly together. It was as if they had been in deep communion with one another across the whole process. Thus, Passage, while inspired by my singular experience of grief, became an unintentional demonstration of the universality of loss and the power of art-making as a healing practice. I offer them as an invitation for others to create from and to feel communion with what challengingly and ineffably unites us.

Passage, a poem by Forrest Hamer, PhD