Nick Cave on grief

[Mark Thibodeau]

https://www.spin.com/2018/11/nick-cave-death-grief-son-letter/
...where you will find:

In September, Nick Cave launched The Red Hand Files, a website where
he solicits questions from fans and responds with a vulnerable and
frequently bemused sense of grace. The Bad Seeds frontman has used the
dialogues to discuss the beauty of boredom, the monsters under his
bed, the return of Grinderman, and that Miley Cyrus line from the
band’s Push the Sky Away song “Higgs Boson Blues.” The entire website
is worth a read, especially so Cave’s latest dispatch, in which he
discusses grief as a cosmic, redemptive necessity.

The question comes from Cynthia in Shelburne Falls, Vermont, who
recounts the recent deaths of her father, sister, and first love,
explaining that they still communicate with her through dreams. She
asks Cave whether his son Arthur, who died tragically in 2015,
maintains a similar connection with him and his wife Susie.
Considering it has Spin’s staff choked up, we’ve included Cave’s full
response below.

Dear Cynthia,

This is a very beautiful question and I am grateful that you have
asked it. It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal.
That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the
terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is
non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our
minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed
within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and
extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that
whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and
dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will
into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real
as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of
the darkness.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I
hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there.
He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her,
but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its
wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned
imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits
speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of
the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits.
Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible
and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were
jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

With love, Nick.