Nick Cave explains what he learned from the death of his son Arthur

On July 14, 2015 Arthur Cave, son of Nick and his wife Surzie, died at just 15 years after falling from a cliff while he was in Brighton. Now after ten years (and a week) the Australian singer -songwriter shares with his fans a thought on the mourning that he hit him and his family, seven years before another tremendous loss like that of the other son Jethro, who died at 31 years in 2022.

In a long post shared on the Red Hand Files blog, where the Bad Seeds frontman for years – currently on tour in Italy: tonight and tomorrow he will perform at the Cavea of the Music Park in Rome, after the shows in Mantua, Lucca and Pompeii – he holds a real epistolary relationship with the fans, Cave responded to two fans who had contacted him to ask him how he was facing the pain of the death of the Arthur. In the touching post, the musician explained that although The “pain remains” constant, saw it “evolving over time”:

“Pain blossoms with age, becoming less a personal affront, less a cosmic betrayal and more a poetic quality of being as we learn to abandon ourselves to it. What seems unbearable at the end proves to be not unbearable at all. The pain becomes richer, deeper and more structured. It seems more interesting, creative and beautiful”.

Nick Cave also spoke of what he learned following the death of Arthur, telling how the tragic experience led him to Start “to recognize the immense value and potential of our humanity, at the same time recognizing our terrifyingly dangerous situation in the profound situation”:

“I understood that, even if each of us is special and unique, our pain and suffering are not. The world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving”.

Cave also added that Arthur’s loss offered him a deeper understanding of “God”, not as “faith or conviction”, but as “a way of seeing”:

“I understood that God was a form of perception, a means of being careful of the poetic resonance of being. I discovered that God is interwoven in all things, even in the greatest evils and in our deepest desperation. Sometimes I hear the world pulsing with a rich and lyrical energy; Other times I feel it flat, empty and malicious. I understood that God was present and active in both experiences“.

After telling how his wife Susie makes frequent dreams in which Arthur comes to visit her, Cave concluded:

“I don’t know what else I learned, except that we are still here, a decade later, to live in the radiant heart of the trauma, the place where all thoughts and dreams converge and where all hope and pain reside, the bright and tear -ray eye of the storm: this swirling boy who is God, like everything else”.