Don’t deny your grief.
"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built Out of longing great wonders have been willed."
- Nick Cave
It's safe to say that after the last two years we are all experiencing some sense of loss. A loss of a loved one, a business, a job, or even just a way of life.
It's also safe to say that we've all heard our fair share of cringy cliches meant to help us through that Loss, such as "time heals all wounds" or "when God shuts a door he opens a window". It's as if to say shut up and suck it up.
Nick Cave is a singer, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and actor from Australia. He is known for his deep emotional vocals and for fronting the rock bands Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the birthday party, and Grinderman and for his climatic scores composed with his friend Warren Ellis. He has also gained fame for his intensely vulnerable blog the red hand files named after his hit song "red right hand".
On 14 July 2015 Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff while hiking in Ovingdean, near Brighton, he did not survive his injuries.
Cave who was in Brighton to start recording his 16th Bad Seeds album " skeleton tree" was understandably hit hard by the loss of his son and could easily have shut down and called off the album.
His son's death ultimately ended up having a huge influence on the creative direction of the Bad Seeds’ music as well as on his blog.
Cave who never shied away from dark and emotional topics in his writing took his vulnerability to another level as he used his pen to work through his grief in a very public way.
Responding to questions about the song "girl in amber" from that album and has said that the song has followed him around those traumatic years. The song was initially happy but after being put on hold for a year the experience of his loss dramatically changed its meaning. In an interview he was about how his son's death affected the album he is quoted saying...
“Things had changed. Arthur, my son, had died a few months earlier and I was existing in a kind of fugue-state, numbly sitting in the studio listening to the songs, trying to make sense of the material we had been working on over the last year, and as I listened to the version of ‘Girl in Amber’, I was completely overwhelmed by what I heard. It was suddenly and tragically clear that ‘Girl in Amber’ had found its ‘who’. The ‘who’ was Susie, my wife — held impossibly, as she was at the time, within her grief, reliving each day a relentless spinning song that began with the ringing of the phone and ended with the collapse of her world. The eerie, death-obsessed second verse seemed to speak directly to me, and I added the half-line ‘Your little blue-eyed boy’, but left the rest of the verse as it was.”
After his son's death Cave didn't let his grief destroy him but he also didn't deny it. He accepted that his grief was part of him and that ultimately grief is about change and is part of life, as worthy of celebrating as joy.
Those cliches about loss that are always meant to help but just piss us all off are all missing out on one key point that Nick Cave has expressed so poetically.
So whatever liss you're experiencing right now I'm not saying you need to sing it for the world to hear but don't write it off either denying how it's changed you is both useless and dangerous. Allow yourself to feel it and find an outlet for those feeling so they don't consume you.
-Jason Brown
