Nick Cave on Grief (Ed Batista)

Australian musician Nick Cave is no stranger to grief. At age 19 his father was killed in an automobile collision, a trauma that seems to have contributed not only to his decision to drop out of school to pursue music, but also to the initiation of a decades-long heroin habit, which he finally kicked after multiple stints in rehab. Nearly 40 years later, in 2015, Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff and died from his injuries. The loss of Arthur had a profound effect on Cave and his wife Susie Bick, transforming not only their shared perspective on life, but also Cave's approach to music, art, and religion.

Cave discusses all of these topics at length with journalist Seán O'Hagan in a revelatory new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, which proclaims on the back cover, "This is not a memoir. This is a conversation." Distilled from more than 40 hours of phone calls between Cave and O'Hagen over the past two years, the book provides a setting in which the two men explore complex ideas that require not only ample time and space, but also a tremendous amount of trust and a willingness to be candid and vulnerable. (In addition to serving as Cave's interlocutor, O'Hagan acknowledges his own grief following the loss of his younger brother Kieran.)

Nick Cave: ...I don't know quite how to explain this, Seán, except that perhaps God is the trauma itself.

Seán O'Hagan: You're going to have to try to explain that one. What do you mean by "God is the trauma itself?"

Cave: That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain--you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems to fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem to endangered, and yet so beautiful. To me it feels that, in this dark place, the idea of a God feels more present or maybe more essential. It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. It feels that, in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next. [p 32]

Cave: You've experienced sudden loss and grief, too, Seán, so you know what I'm talking about. You are tested to the extremes of your resilience, but it's also almost impossible to describe the terrible intensity of the experience. Words just fall away.

O'Hagan: Yes, and nothing prepares you for it. It's tidal, and it can be capsizing.

Cave: That's a good word for it--"capsizing." But I also think it is important to say that these feelings I am describing, this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact it is ordinary, in that in happens to all of us at some time or another. We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven't been by now, you will be in time--that's for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That's the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.

O'Hagan: What I remember about the period after my younger brother, Kieran, died was a sense of total distractedness that came over me, an inability to concentrate that lasted for months. Did you experience that?

Cave: Yes, distraction was a big part of it, too.

O'Hagan: We talked earlier about the act of lighting a candle, and that for me was the only thing that could still my mind. It was as if peace had descended if only for a few moments.

Cave: Stillness is what you crave in grief. When Arthur died, I was filled with an internal chaos, a roaring physical feeling in my very being as well as a terrible sense of dread and impending doom. I remember I could feel it literally rushing through my body and bursting out the ends of my fingers. When I was alone with my thoughts, there was an almost overwhelming feeling coursing through me. I have never felt anything like it. It was mental torment, of course, but also physical, deeply physical, a kind of annihilation of the self--an interior screaming.

O'Hagan: Did you find a way to be still even for a few moments?

Cave: I had been meditating for years, but after the accident, I really thought I could never meditate again, that to sit still and allow that feeling to take hold of me would be some form of torture, impossible to endure. And yet, at one point I went up to Arthur's room and sat there on his bed, surrounded by his things, and I closed my eyes and meditated. I forced myself to do it. And, for the briefest moment in that meditation, I had this awareness that things could somehow be all right. It was like a small pulse of momentary light and then all the torment came rushing back. It was a sign and a significant shift. But when you mentioned that sense of constant distractedness, I was thinking about how, after Arthur died, there was a raging conversation going on in my head endlessly. It felt different to normal brain chatter. It was like a conversation with my own dying self--or with death itself. And, in that period, the idea that we all die just became so fucking palpable that it infected everything. Everything seemed to be at the point of dying.

O'Hagan: You sensed that death was all around you, just biding its time?

Cave: Exactly. And that feeling was very extreme for Susie. In fact, she kept thinking that everyone was going to die--and soon. It was not just that everyone eventually dies, but that everyone we knew was going to die, like, tomorrow. She had these absolutely existential free-falls that were to do with everyone's life being in terrible jeopardy. It was heart-breaking. But, in a way, that sense of death being present, and all those wild, traumatised feelings that went with it, ultimately gave us this weird, urgent energy. Not at first, but in time. It was, I don't know how to explain it, an energy that opened up all kinds of possibilities and a strange reckless power came out of it. It was as if the worst had happened and nothing could hurt us, and all our ordinary concerns were little more than indulgences. There was a freedom in that. [pp 41-43]

Cave: If there is one message I have, really, it concerns the question all grieving people ask: Does it ever get better?... The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.

O'Hagan: How long did it take before you got to that point?

Cave: I don't know. I'm sorry, but I can't remember. I don't remember much of that time at all. It was incremental, or it is incremental. I think it was because I started to write about it and to talk about it, to attempt to articulate what was going on. I made a concerted effort to discover a language around this indescribable but very ordinary state of being. To be forced to grieve publicly I had to find a means of articulating what had happened. Finding the language became, for me, the way out. There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It's not something we are practiced at as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it's too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves. [pp 43-44]

Cave: I have since come to understand that there is little headway that we can make around grief until we learn to articulate it--speak it, say it out loud, sing about it, write it down, or whatever. There is no place to speak about grief in our regular lives. It's just not done, so we are left with these infernal abstractions that reside in our mind, and that, perhaps, unconsciously impact our behaviour. [p 95]

Cave: Arthur's death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person--and, Seán, when I use that word "religious," you do understand the way that I am using it, right? We've talked enough about that for you to understand I am not talking about being a traditional Christian or something like that. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt on a profound level a kind of deep inclusion in the human predicament, really, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are each of us, imperilled.

O'Hagan: You feel that we are imperilled?

Cave: Yes. Insofar as anything can turn catastrophic at any time, personally, for each of us. Look at this pandemic. Look how unbelievably vulnerable we are. All these systems supposedly holding the world in place and we are laid low by a virus. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don't. But certainly everyone will understand it in time. And because of that, I feel a kind of empathy with people that I never felt before. It feels urgent and new and fundamental. For the predicament we have all found ourselves in--the predicament of an imperilled life. [pp 105-106]

Cave: I think grief reinvents us. When I say grief, I mean the second life we lead after trauma. It feels more essential. The way we respond to things is altered--we become, as human beings, more precise.

O'Hagan: Yes, and much more selective in terms of what we listen to, read, watch. I like to think we become more attentive and discerning, but maybe it's just that we have less patience these days. [p 151]

Cave: We've talked about this a lot, the idea that suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change, and that it somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better. That God bestows upon us these terrible, devastating opportunities that bring amelioration and transformation. This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change, is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves. [pp 165-166]

O'Hagan: I wonder if it is necessary to almost go under in order to come through stronger.

Cave: You mean, in regard to grieving?

O'Hagan: Yes.

Cave: That's an interesting idea, and I completely understand what you mean, but there is a very dangerous and seductive feeling to living life on the brink that I think should be resisted. In that very dark place, the grieving person can feel a proximity to the one they have lost that can be difficult to turn away from, or return from. That particular kind of grief can have a deadening and, I don't know, mechanising effect that, in some cases, can be permanent. I mean, Susie and I felt this within ourselves; for a while, there was a kind of zombification. I don't want you to misunderstand what I am saying, but there can be a kind of morbid worshipping of an absence. A reluctance to move beyond the trauma, because the trauma is where the one you lost resides, and therefore the place where meaning exists. [p 168]

Cave: We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.

O'Hagan: Yes, and when you are deep in grief, there's no real comfort to be had in people constantly telling you that time will make things better. But I distinctly remember waking up one morning, having finally had a decent night's sleep, and thinking, it's going to be okay. There was a sense that something had shifted imperceptibly. Did that happen to you?

Cave: Well, at first there was nothing but darkness, but, over time, Susie and I started to experience something like small fragments of light. These points of light were essentially thoughtful gestures from the people we encountered. We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naive, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn't bad, at all--in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. I think Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move toward this loving force, or perish. [pp 169-170]

Cave: I am very familiar with this feeling. It is the compensatory gift at the heart of grief. The usual precepts collapse under the weight of the calamity: the terrible demands that we place upon ourselves; our own internal judging voice; the endless expectations and opinions of others. They suddenly become less important and there is a wonderful freedom in that as well.

O'Hagan: Well, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," as the great Kris Kristofferson put it.

Cave: Ha! Exactly, Seán, exactly! Fuck, I love that song. [p 190]

Cave: Grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return. I have seen it often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There is nothing to lead them back from the abyss. And beyond that, too, I think the point-blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I'm talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as a kind of inherent evil. That stance is a denial of all the potential good religion brings: the comfort, the succour, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness--not always, of course, but often. And, as we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere, in tribalism, in their identity, in politics, for God's sake, in possessions. Look at our glorious secular world as it stands today. To me, secularism can also feel like a kind of hardening around an absence. So, essentially, what I am trying to present is the idea of grief as a gift. Grief as a positive force. Grief that can become, if we allow it its full expression, a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy. [p 220]

O'Hagan: You both somehow managed to go beyond the trauma and the grief to the place where you are now. Did you make a conscious decision, as I think you once said to me, to defy it?

Cave: ...The life Susie and I have is full and replete with meaning. I love Susie more than I ever have. She feels the same about me. Our love is often joyous, which doesn't mean we don't shed our share of tears. I don't know how we got to where we are, because, in truth, I don't know where that is. I do know we shall never recover fully from the death of our son, nor should we. We are marked by it, and Susie carries a sadness that lives just below the surface of her loveliness, and perhaps that's what also makes her the astonishing and oceanic woman she is. I do know that Susie and I apportion meaning to the smallest things, in a way we never did before, and we get enormous comfort from this. Grief comes and goes, but it no longer scares us. We can collapse together, or apart, in the knowledge that tomorrow we will be back on our feet. I know that mostly I am happy and life is good. I don't mean that casually or trivially. I mean that life is actually good. People are good. I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering. I think people can do both terrible things and wonderful things when faced with the true understanding of their own powerlessness, vulnerability and lack of control. And I think Susie and I are acutely aware of the precarious nature of not only our lives, but all lives--their rareness, their preciousness--and that it can all disappear in an instant. In the light of that knowledge, we find gratitude to be a simple and essential act. And Arthur showed us that--the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world. Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us.

O'Hagan: You see the world as essentially good.

Cave: Well, in Revelations, there are those beautiful lines: "Look, He is coming with the clouds / And every eye shall see Him." I feel the goodness of the world must be experienced to some extent through the mechanism of suffering--the God in the cloud--if the notion of goodness is to hold any kind of truth or real substance. Beneath the surface, simple happiness is rarely simple at all, and most often hard-earned, and the price can be high. How Susie and I arrived at that place, I don't know, Seán. Like I said, I don't what what this strange place even is, but it was reached with baby steps, and through darkened rooms and countless cigarettes and a multitude of kindnesses from so many people, and many lessons learned along the way--just like anything else. [pp 239-240]

For Further Reading

The Red Hand Files (Nick Cave). A website that Cave launched in 2018, The Red Hand Files consists of a series of answers to questions posed by the public. One of the most moving is Issue #6: in which Cave responds to the following:

I have experienced the death of my father, my sister, and my first love in the past few years and feel that I have some communication with them, mostly through dreams. They are helping me. Are you and Susie feeling that your son Arthur is with you and communicating in some way?

BOOKS AND ESSAYS

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande)

The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)

Dying: A Memoir (Cory Taylor)

Gratitude (Oliver Sacks)

Mortality (Christopher Hitchens)

Sheryl Sandberg, UC Berkeley Commencement (2016)

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (Katie Roiphe)

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)

Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Martin Hägglund, The New York Times, 2019)

POEMS