Nick Cave has shared a poignant reflection on the loss of his teenage son Arthur, 10 years since his death.
The Australian musician, 67, frequently answers questions from fans or shares updates on his Red Hand Files website. In a post this week, he answered a question about what he and his wife, Susie, had learnt in the decade since Arthur’s passing, and whether their pain lasts “forever”.
Arthur, 15, died on 15 July 2015 as a result from injuries sustained when he fell from a cliff in Brighton, near where he and his family lived at the time.
The grief Cave experienced has informed much of his work since, including his 2016 album with the Bad Seeds, Skeleton Tree.
“The pain remains, but I have found that it evolves over time,” Cave wrote in response. “Grief blossoms with age, becoming less a personal affront, less a cosmic betrayal, and more a poetic quality of being as we learn to surrender to it.
“As we are confronted with the intolerable injustice of death, what seems unbearable ultimately turns out not to be unbearable at all. Sorrow grows richer, deeper, and more textured. It feels more interesting, creative, and lovely.”
He explained that, to his “great surprise”, he had learnt that he is “part of a common human story”.
“I began to recognise the immense value and potential of our humanness while simultaneously acknowledging, at my core, our terrifyingly perilous situation. I learned we all actually die,” Cave continued.
“I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not. Over time, Susie and I came to understand that the world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving – indeed, lovely – tilting ever toward good.”
Cave continued by addressing how Arthur’s death had also impacted his views on religion, finding that “God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing”.
“I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being,” he said. “I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.”
Heartbreak, he wrote, was the “most proportional response” to the state of the world and helped bring a “clarity” to both the living world and “the world beyond the veil”, while sorrow is “a way of conducting oneself in the world, of living it, of worshipping it”.
Cave revealed that he had read his letter to Susie, with whom he also shares Arthur’s twin brother Earl, and she agreed that “things get better in time”.
He concluded by admitting that he was still unsure what he had learnt, other than that he and his family were still here a decade later, “living within the radiant heart of the trauma, the place where all thoughts and dreams converge and where all hope and sorrow reside, the bright and teary eye of the storm – this whirling boy who is God, like every other thing. We remember him today.”
Cave recently delighted fans after donating 2,000 books from his personal collection to a charity shop in Hove.
The musician made the donation to an Oxfam bookshop on Blatchington Road in the East Sussex coastal town, having once used the books as part of an art installation he created with filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
The Times reported that among the collection were books by Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan, as well as Johnny Cash’s first novel Man in White.
A publicist for Cave said that the star didn’t want to comment on the donation, explaining: “He thinks the discoveries will remain intriguing mysteries for those who find them.”
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