“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” — Pablo Picasso
Today I sat with a young man who was remembering his lost friends. It was the anniversary of a death, and anniversaries carry with them a strange gravity. They summon memories we thought were buried, binding us to times and places we would rather not revisit. As he spoke, I could see the weight of recollection pressing down on him. His words came slowly, shaped not so much by what he wanted to say as by what he could not.
He told me that people are always quick to assure him, “It happened for a reason.” This phrase is a familiar one in grief, an attempt to impose order on chaos, to suggest that pain is never meaningless. But he confessed that he could not find the reason, could not see what possible purpose lay behind his friend’s death. His honesty was piercing, because it was true.
I told him I did not believe things happened for reasons in that way. Death does not come as part of some intricate plan, at least not one accessible to us. Suffering is not divinely allocated like tasks in some cosmic ledger. Instead, what defines us as people is how we respond to what happens. In the wake of death, we do not solve grief like a riddle; we learn to carry it. We live on in relation to it. Then I gave him a hug, and he went on his way.
As I sat afterward, I thought of Picasso’s Femme assise (Melancholy Woman) and the other Blue Period paintings I have encountered—in Washington, Chicago, Ontario, Detroit. They are works born of death and grief, painted in the shadow of Picasso’s friend Carlos Casagemas, who shot himself in 1901. The trauma of that loss plunged Picasso into the Blue Period, a world of color drained to its lowest register, where grief saturates every figure.
In Femme assise, the woman sits folded inward, her body turned into a closed shape, a vessel for sorrow. There is no gesture toward resolution, no narrative of healing or transcendence. Instead, Picasso gives us a portrait of pure endurance. She sits, she waits, she suffers. And in her posture, I saw something mirrored of the young man beside me—his head bowed, his words halting, his grief without explanation.
The Blue Period works are not only about Picasso’s grief but about grief as a universal human condition. They present figures who are anonymous, stripped of individuality, as if suffering has made them archetypes. In this sense, the paintings remind me of what Kierkegaard wrote: that despair is “the sickness unto death,” but also the place where we encounter our truest selves. To grieve is to face the reality of our own finitude, to feel the sharp edges of our humanity.
Blue itself carries symbolic resonance. For centuries, blue was the color of the Virgin Mary, the mantle of compassion. It was costly and rare, a pigment of reverence. Yet it is also the color of the ocean depths, of loneliness, of winter twilight. In Picasso’s hands, it becomes both wound and salve. It shows us the isolation of sorrow but also the dignity of its endurance. To sit in blue is not to give up; it is to remain.
The psychology of grief tells us that mourning is not about “moving on,” but about “moving with.” We integrate the loss into our lives, we carry it forward. That is what I tried to tell the young man: not to search for reasons, but to live into his response. The world is not ordered to make sense of tragedy. Instead, we are given the capacity to endure, to companion one another, to hold space in the blue.
Picasso painted death and despair, but he also painted survival. His figures, though bent inward, do not vanish. They remain present. That is the paradox of grief: it diminishes and strengthens, isolates and connects. Sitting beside the young man today, I felt that paradox. I could not give him reasons, but I could give him presence. I could sit with him as Picasso’s blue figures sit, enduring.
I cannot help but think, as I reflect on Femme assise and on my conversation today, of the students I have lost over the years. Some were taken suddenly, in accidents that left no time for goodbyes—car wrecks, overdoses, the recklessness of playing with guns. Others were taken slowly, by illness or by the long shadow of despair that ends in suicide. Each loss remains with me. I carry them the way this young man carries his friends, not as abstractions or lessons, but as names and faces, laughter and silence, reminders of what it means to live in the fragile borderland between life and death.
When I encounter Picasso’s blue figures in galleries—whether in Washington, Chicago, Ontario, or Detroit—I recognize in them something of my students, something of myself. Their bowed heads and folded bodies are not only symbols of grief; they are portraits of memory. They remind me that to mourn is also to remember, and to remember is to keep carrying those who are gone.
Perhaps that is why these works still hold me captive. They do not offer reasons. They do not soothe with false assurances. Instead, they invite us to sit in the stillness, to endure in the company of sorrow. And in that endurance, I find a strange kind of hope. For if grief can isolate, it can also bind us—teacher to student, friend to friend, stranger to stranger. It is not the reason that matters. It is the response.