Nick Cave on Living with Loss and the Central Paradox of Grief as a Portal to Aliveness

“The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains… a luminous super-presence.”

Perched near the untimely end of a life strewn with losses, contemplating what remains when a loved one vanishes into “the drift called the infinite,” Emily Dickinson wrote:

Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.

I too have waded through the tide pool with its lapping waves of grief. It is impossible to get through a life — through half a life, even — without living through the two most universal human experiences: love and loss, each presupposing the other, each haunted either by the specter of the other or by its ever-present prospect. To love is to live always with the possibility of loss; to sorrow with loss is to have loved.

That is what Abraham Lincoln sensed when he told a friend’s bereaved daughter that loss eventually resolves into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.” That is what Elizabeth Gilbert articulated a century and a half later in her exquisite meditation on how to move through grief as grief moves through you, drawing on her own experience to observe:

Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted… Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

That, too, is what Nick Cave — another lush mind rooted in a large and luminous spirit, another artist of uncommon originality — explores with tremendous sensitivity of insight in answering a young woman’s lyrical question about how to live with the disorientation of grief’s lapping waves, how to parse the almost-thereness with which a loved one gone haunts our days, consecrates the aliveness in all things — trees, birds, wind, night — with the thereness, breaks our heart over and over with the almostness.

Cave writes:

The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains. That which remains rises in time from the dark with a burning physicality — a luminous super-presence — as we acquaint ourselves with this new and different world. In loss things — both animate and inanimate — take on an added intensity and meaning.

In a sentiment evocative of Pico Iyer’s soulful meditation on the autumn light as a portal to finding beauty and impermanence and luminosity in loss, Cave adds:

This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives. We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.

At the heart of the young woman’s question is the central paradox of loss: how in grief we can still be profoundly, transcendently moved by beauty — by a symphony or a sunflower or the song of the hermit thrush — and yet a slender screen of unreality slips between us and these motive forces, us and everything. “It’s strange to feel so connected and yet have a feeling of being so disconnected,” she writes. Cave addresses this paradox not as a disconnect but as the very wellspring of our connection to life:

There is, of course, another side where we lose our resolve — we drop our guard, or just grow tired and descend into that other, darker, less-lovely world, as we disconnect and retreat deep into ourselves… These revolving feelings of connection and disconnection… are the opposing forces of loss that define our lived experience… Many of us inhabit this uncanny realm of loss — and all of us will find our way there in time.

Complement with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, Seneca on the key to resilience through grief, and a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love, then revisit Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence and do subscribe to his spare and excellent newsletter.

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