When Loss Becomes Art

Hamnet, Hamlet, and the loss of my son

After watching Hamnet, I found myself thinking about Shakespeare, my son Sam, and the unbearable work of turning loss into art.

Not the romantic version of that idea.

Not the comforting notion that suffering somehow becomes beautiful if one is gifted enough to transform it. I do not believe that. The death of a child is not redeemed by art. It is not balanced by art. It is not justified because something meaningful may later come from it.

There is no bargain in which the loss of a son becomes acceptable.

And yet, watching the film, I understood something with painful clarity: when grief is too large to remain inside the body, it looks for another form.

That is what moved me most about Hamnet. Not only the portrayal of a family shattered by the death of a child, but the way that grief moved through the father. It did not announce itself neatly. It did not explain itself. It appeared in silence, absence, distance, helplessness, and finally, in creation.

The movie gives us Shakespeare not as a monument, but as a man wounded beyond language. A father who cannot undo what has happened. A husband who cannot fully enter the grief of his wife. An artist who discovers, perhaps against his own will, that the wound has followed him into the theater.

And then comes Hamlet.

A play haunted by a son.

A play haunted by a father.

A play in which the dead are not gone, but still speaking. Still demanding to be heard. Still altering the living.

That is the unbearable truth the film captures so well: sometimes art is not invention. Sometimes art is what grief becomes when it can no longer remain private.

It has to move somewhere.

It has to find a chamber large enough to hold it.

For Shakespeare, at least in the emotional truth of Hamnet, that chamber became the stage. The grief did not arrive as confession. It arrived disguised as drama. It became a prince in black. It became a ghost. It became a kingdom unsettled by death. It became the ache of a son reaching toward a father, and a father reaching back through the veil.

This is what great art often does. It carries the thing too painful to say directly and gives it another body.

Not to hide it.

To make it bearable.

Watching the film, I thought of my son, Sam.

I thought of how grief changes not only the heart, but the imagination. Before such a loss, imagination can feel like possibility. Afterward, it becomes something else. It becomes a passageway. A place where the dead may appear, where time may loosen, where the soul may continue its journey beyond the visible world.

Since Sam’s death, I have written seven novels and dozens of Substacks. I don’t say that as an achievement. It feels less like something I accomplished and more like something I survived through. I did not begin with a plan to produce that much work. I did not sit down and decide to turn sorrow into a literary project.

It was more instinctive than that.

Something in me needed to keep moving.

Something in me needed to continue speaking.

Something in me needed to search beyond the silence.

That is why Hamnet struck me so deeply. It did not present art as triumph. It presented art as aftermath.

As the strange, almost unbearable consequence of loving someone who is no longer physically present.

Because grief does not end when the funeral ends.

It keeps making claims upon the living.

It enters the room at unexpected times. It changes the meaning of ordinary things. It sits beside joy. It follows memory. It alters the future. And if the grieving person is a writer, painter, musician, actor, or storyteller, eventually it finds its way into the work.

Not always directly.

Not always by name.

But it enters.

It changes the weight of the sentences.

It deepens the questions.

It makes the work haunted.

I understand that now in a way I did not before. My novels are not “about” Sam in any simple sense. They are not memorials dressed as fiction. But I know that his absence moves beneath them. It is there in my fascination with the soul. It is there in my repeated return to death, destiny, time, hidden realms, and the possibility that love survives the boundaries of the physical world.

And in Between Two Gates, that presence comes closest to the surface.

That novel is, in many ways, my attempt to imagine Sam’s afterlife journey—not as an escape from grief, and not as a way to soften what happened, but as a way to follow him beyond the place where this world forced me to stop. Through Samuel’s passage after death, through the realms he enters, the beings he encounters, and the truths he must face, I was writing toward the question that has lived inside me since Sam died:

Where did he go?

I do not claim to know the answer. But writing that book allowed me to remain in relationship with the question. It gave my love somewhere to travel. It gave my grief a landscape. It gave my imagination permission to cross the threshold that my body could not cross.

It is there in my refusal to accept that what we can touch is all there is.

Perhaps that is what loss does to the artist. It breaks open the visible world and makes the invisible impossible to ignore.

Before grief, one may write from curiosity, ambition, discipline, or imagination.

After grief, one writes from necessity.

The page becomes a place of continuation. Not closure. Not healing in the clean, convenient way people often use that word. But continuation. A way of remaining in relationship with what has been lost. A way of giving form to love when the person who received that love is no longer standing before you.

That is what I saw in Hamnet.

A father who could not save his son.

A writer who could not remain untouched by that fact.

A grief that entered his art and became larger than one household, one family, one lifetime.

In Hamlet, the dead father returns as a ghost, but perhaps the deeper ghost is the lost son who hovers behind the play itself. The child who is gone but not gone. The absence that bends the language. The wound that gives the work its terrible depth.

That is why the connection to Hamlet feels so powerful. The grief echoes. The play seems to carry

something that cannot be reduced to plot.

It carries a father’s wound.

And watching it, I felt the quiet recognition of another father’s wound.

There is a kind of writing that comes from the mind.

There is another kind that comes from the fracture.

The first can be clever. It can be elegant. It can entertain.

The second carries a different force. It may not always be polished. It may not always behave. But it has blood in it. It has memory in it. It has the tremor of someone trying to speak from the place where language nearly failed.

That is the writing I understand now.

The writing that comes after the world has broken.

The writing that does not ask, “What story would be interesting?”

But instead asks, “How do I keep living with what I now know?”

For me, writing has become one answer to that question.

Not the whole answer.

Not a solution.

But a way forward.

A way to keep building when part of life has collapsed. A way to continue loving when love can no longer move in the ordinary direction. A way to ask, again and again, whether death is truly an ending or whether it is only the most painful threshold the living must learn to imagine beyond.

This is why art matters.

Not because it saves us from suffering.

But because it gives suffering a form that can be shared.

Private grief, when carried alone, can become unbearable. But when it enters art, it becomes visible. It becomes something others can stand beside. It becomes a bridge between one wounded heart and another.

That is what Shakespeare gave the world.

That is what Hamnet reminded me.

That loss does not become art because grief is beautiful.

It becomes art because love is still looking for a way to speak.

And sometimes, when the person we love is gone, the only place left for that love to go is into the work.

Into the sentence.

Into the stage.

Into the story.

Into the ghost.

Into the hope that what has been lost in one world may still be waiting in another.

I do not believe art redeems the death of a son.

But I do believe it can carry the love that remains.

And perhaps that is the unbearable work of turning loss into art: not to make grief acceptable, not to make it useful, not to make it beautiful, but to give love a voice after the world has gone silent.