Nick Cave has opened up about his grief over the death of his sons.
Nick Cave’s resilience in grief
The 66-year-old musician lost his son Arthur, 15, in 2015, when the teenager fell from a cliff near the family home in Brighton and suffered further grief seven years later when his son Jethro, 31, died and Nick revealed he is starting to find “resilience” in his sadness.
He told Mojo magazine: “It feels like that moves on, it doesn’t move for me in the sense it’s always there. But there’s a sort of resilience.
“I’ve really noticed this in Susie [Nick’s wife]. When you are broken apart, you come back tougher. When the worst happens, other things don’t feel as important any more.”
He added that his 2017 tour helped him to cope after Arthur’s death.
He said: “It’s difficult to talk about this but there was a feeling I had never felt before – of stepping into a kind of outpouring of love.
“I think people had an enormous emotional commitment beyond the music. It was a very beautiful thing and completely unexpected and very helpful.”
Meanwhile, Nick – who also has sons Luke, 33, from his marriage to his first wife, Viviane Carneiro and Earl, 24, with spouse Susie – recently revealed his hopes that his children will continue to do their “bit to improve the world”.
Writing on his blog, ‘The Red Hand Files’, in which he responds to questions from fans, Nick said: “One of the enduring privileges of advanced parenthood is finally being able to abandon any attempt to live up to the impossible standards set by our children. Instead, we lean back and fall unapologetically into our obsolescence. We understand that we are what we are and hope our children grow into somewhat better versions of ourselves. We feel we have done our bit to improve the world and pray that our children will continue to do so. We also hope that we have raised our children to be strong enough to withstand the generational contempt that will almost certainly come their way when they, in turn, have their own children.”
