Many people will tell you that grief is what thrusts you into adulthood—that it marks the moment when the world stops feeling padded. It is the instant you understand that love and loss are not opposites but extensions of the same experience. Loss is love. Or perhaps love is simply the most elaborate form of loss we agree to risk.

From the earliest myths to contemporary cinema, suffering does not merely accompany beauty—it produces it. It sharpens it. It gives it weight. The stories that linger are rarely the ones where everything works out neatly. They are the ones where something is sacrificed. Where someone leaves.

The first book that ever made me cry was War Horse by Michael Morpugo. I’d won it at a reading competition in primary school (because of course the price you get for reading the most books is another one). There is something formative about the first time a story teaches you that pain is not a flaw in the narrative but its purpose. That crying is not a sign the story failed you, but that it reached you. Childhood is often painted as innocent because it is untouched by grief, but in reality, it is simply untouched by understanding. The first encounter with sadness in art is the first rehearsal for the real losses that will come later. It is where we learn how to feel without consequence, how to mourn without permanence. The brain often fails to distinguish between fiction and reality, activating the same neural empathy and emotional pathways when a beloved character dies as it would for a real person. This occurs because the brain processes emotional, imaginary, or perceived experiences similarly, triggering genuine stress responses and grief.

“Ghost
Adieu, adieu, adieu.
 Remember me.

He exits.

Hamlet
O all you host of heaven! O Earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? O fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. “

From Shakespeare's Hamlet

Grief, here, is not passive. It reorganises the mind. Hamlet does not simply mourn—he rewrites himself around loss. Everything else becomes trivial. Memory becomes sacred. Pain becomes the axis around which meaning forms.

— I don’t think I have an entire book in me.
— You can’t even dream a whole dream can you? 

The Holdovers (2023)

 We are obsessed with suffering because it is the point where emotion becomes undeniable.

There is something deeply voyeuristic about the way sadness is consumed—especially when it belongs to women. Women’s pain is routinely exposed, dissected, aestheticised, and offered up as emotional nourishment for audiences. Think of Fleabag. Think of every tortured female protagonist whose suffering is framed as growth, wisdom, depth.

How much of art is women’s suffering distilled into something pleasurable?

There is simply less to lose, socially, as a man by being vulnerable. At worst, he risks embarrassment. A woman risks being defined by it. Her pain becomes her narrative.

We do not simply witness women’s sadness — we archive it. We quote it, romanticise it. The crying girl becomes an aesthetic, a symbol, a shorthand for depth. Her breakdown is a season arc. Her trauma is character development. And while men are allowed to move beyond their grief, women are expected to live inside it, to become palatable through suffering. Pain becomes proof of substance. Without it, she is shallow; with it, she is profound, dignified by her suffering.

“We have mirrorballs in the middle of a dance floor, because they reflect light. They are broken a million times, and that’s what makes them so shiny. We have people like that in society, too. They hang there, and every time they break, it entertains us; and when you shine a light on them, it’s this glittering, fantastic thing. But then a lot of the time, when the spotlight isn’t on them, they’re just there, up on a pedestal, but nobody’s watching them.”

taylor swift

I used to be obsessed with happy endings. Nothing else felt satisfying be it for books or movies or songs. This led my mother to introduce a new concept to me: “reasonable endings”. Which really meant: good enough. Realistic. Pain that wasn’t free, just real, integral to the story. Now when I recommend things I know she’ll later comment on how sad it was, but sadness does anything but rot the apple in my book. Which brings us back to one of the oldest love stories we have: Orpheus and Eurydice.

The fact of the matter is that in every variation of the myth Orpheus cannot escape his fate of losing Eurydice and will always turn around. There is no such thing as an Orpheus that does not turn around, because there is no such thing as an Orpheus that does not love Eurydice.

 In some versions he turns around because she begs and pleads for him to, in others he can’t hear her and turns to see if she’s really there, in others she trips and he turns to catch her before she can get hurt…he turns around for love every time.

An Orpheus that doesn’t turn around is an Orpheus that wouldn’t travel to the underworld in the first place. Because Orpheus would not be Orpheus if he did not turn around for Eurydice. That’s the tragedy : he’ll always turn around. The whole point of their myth is that love transcends life, Orpheus is one of the only humans in Greek myths to have gone into the kingdom of Hades and returned, and one of the only figures in general to have done so selflessly.

Even in the one version that’s a happy ending, in Christoph Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). In this one Amor (Cupid) intervenes at the end and restores Euridice to life, allowing Orfeo and Euridice to be reunited and live together. So  he still turns around like always and Amor just knows that their love is one of the purest so he restores her. 

The value of the story lies in what binds it to grief. Who’s to say that it’s not just an extension of love? Even in its happiest form, the story cannot exist without loss first.

And this pattern repeats everywhere.

“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved? “

from ovid’s book x of metamorphoses

In Hamnet, the first story Will tells Agnes is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. He struggles to speak to people, and Agnes prompts him—tell me a story then. They both already know what it is. The story becomes a confession. A revelation of their love he knows so deep it already carries its own doom. They can be another instance of the myth just as the son they lose finds himself the hero of his father’s play. Interchangeability is what storytelling is built on. Names change. Contexts shift. But grief and love remain recognisable. You can replace Orpheus and Eurydice with any couple in any century and the feeling holds.

Now, I must confess I have publicly declared my distaste for Orpheus many times before, I hated him for his decision, or rather for seeing it through. Ultimately, for looking at his own love. I still come back to the sacrifice of looking being an act of love. And when Will writes the play, he willingly does it to himself and takes on grief to save his Eurydice. The problem of course, is that he knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and she does not until he tells his version, both times. He knows what it costs to turn around and lets it replay over and over again on stage. And why wouldn’t he, now that  what they have to remember is set ? The point of all the stories, ever, is to find the thing you’ll turn around for. 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

At the end of the film, Hamlet is wearing the exact outfit Hamnet wears when Agnes tells him his future—that she sees him grown and strong and working with his father in the theater. And in a sense, that is exactly what happens. The resolution is gentle; there is no miracle nor erasure of pain of any kind. But by facing the grief they come out of it , reconciled not just with one another but with the shared past itself. Closure: something ancient had laid to rest, the curse is broken now, he turned around, the story is done and the rest can be written now. 

Sadness is often framed as something to overcome, a phase to pass through on the way to strength. But what if it is not merely an obstacle, but a teacher? What if grief is not a detour from life, but one of its central roads? Every rite of passage involves loss — of childhood, of certainty, of people we once were. Perhaps we return to art because it mirrors this truth back to us: becoming who we are always costs something. We praise resilience while consuming the wounds that created it.

We stand beneath the mirrorballs of other people’s grief, letting their fractures light up our lives. We call it beauty. We call it art. Rarely do we call it what it is: proof of how deeply someone once loved, and reassurance that we are not insane for wishing for the same access to emotion. Maybe sadness doesn’t exist to entertain. Maybe it exists because love is never risk-free. And maybe art keeps returning to grief not because we enjoy suffering—but because it is the clearest proof that something mattered.

[HERMES]
It’s a sad song 

[HERMES, spoken]
But we sing it anyway

'Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time

I learned that from a friend of mine


Hadestown - Anaïs Mitchell

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