Nick Cave reflects on 10 years since his son Arthur died and lessons learned from grief

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Nick Cave reflects on 10 years since his son Arthur died and lessons learned from grief

Nick Cave has looked back at the 10 years since his son Arthur died, and shared what he has learned from his experience of grief.

The comments relate to the tragic and unexpected death of his 15-year-old son in July 2015. He was one of the twin sons Cave shares with his wife, Susie Bick, and he sadly died following a fall from a cliff near Brighton.

In 2022, Cave confirmed that his eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, had died at the age of 31. His passing came after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

On his Red Hand Files website, two fans reached out to Cave to ask how he is coping with the grief, 10 years on from Arthur’s death. One fan named Carlos asked what he and his partner have “learned” in the time since, while another fan called Emma wrote in asking if the pain they felt then “lasts forever”.

In his touching response, Cave said that while the “pain remains” constant, he has seen it “evolve over time.

“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,” he shared. “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 added that the tragic experience led to him starting “to recognise the immense value and potential of our humanness while simultaneously acknowledging, at my core, our terrifyingly perilous situation.”

“I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not,” he shared, saying that both he and Susie have come to “understand that the world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving”.

Also in his response, Cave said that the loss of Arthur in 2015 gave him a deeper understanding of “God” – not as a “faith or belief” but as “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. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair,” he wrote.

“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.”

The ‘Into My Arms’ singer added that he and his partner have gone on to adopt a more optimistic outlook in the years since Arthur’s death. “These days, I am neither distrustful nor suspicious of the world, even though my heart breaks for it, and I am not despairing, depressed or embittered,” Cave shared.

“Sorrow becomes a way of life, part laughter, part tears, with very little space between. It is a way of conducting oneself in the world, of loving it, of worshipping it.”

After sharing how Susie has frequent dreams where Arthur comes to visit her, Cave concluded: “I’m not sure what else I’ve learned, Carlos, except that here we still are, 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.”

This isn’t the first time that Cave has opened up to fans about his experience of grief. Last year, the Bad Seeds frontman spoke about how the experiences shaped him in both his personal and professional life, and led to him placing his art on less of a pedestal.

“That idea that art trounces everything, it just doesn’t apply to me anymore,” he said at the time. “Rather than making me bitter, it did the opposite in some way. It made me much more connected to people in general.”

He then shared earlier this year that he had become somewhat “repelled” by work after the loss, and came to realise that his musical output was not the “be-all and end-all of everything”.

Before then, he admitted that he regretted recording his 2016 album ‘Skeleton Tree’, so soon after Arthur’s death, and in 2020, he told fans that “there is no other side” to grief, and that he and his partner have had to adjust to living with the loss.

The moving update shared by Cave on Red Hand Files comes around the same time that the singer-songwriter got fans flocking to a charity store in Hove after donating 2,000 books.

Before then, the ‘Red Right Hand’ singer spoke to NME in 2023, and opened up about whether he is trying to pour a feeling of love into his music. “I don’t know about the music, but these days I feel a more urgent need to connect with people,” he said.

“That there’s a kind of duty in that, that maybe I didn’t feel before. That I have at my disposal something that’s very valuable: to make music, and I don’t want to squander that opportunity in phoning in gigs or doing half-hearted attempts. Every one is as important as each other.” Check out that full interview here.

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