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Australian rocker Nick Cave is opening up about the grief of losing his son, Arthur, 10 years ago.
Arthur tragically died after falling from the Ovingdean Gap cliffs in Brighton, England in 2015. He was 15 years old. Then, in May 2022, Cave’s oldest son Jethro Lazenby died at age 31.
In an excerpt posted to his Red Hand Files website this month, where he often answers questions from fans, Cave opened up about how he and his wife Susie navigate grief.
“The pain remains, but I have found that it evolves 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 wrote.
Adding, “As we are confronted with the intolerable injustice of death, 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.”
Cave shared that he found his experience is part of “a common human story” — and it drew him closer to God.
“I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world – to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you, and this sentiment resonates within all things,” he wrote. “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.”
The “O Children” singer said he read the letter to his wife, and she “agreed that things get better in time.”
Courtesy Cave Family; Mike Marsland/Wireimage
“She reminded me that her dreams of Arthur from ten years ago were terrible, scorched-earth affairs, full of shame and weeping. She said Arthur still visits her every week. He is always the same age, around ten years old,” he wrote.
He 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. We remember him today.”
In an interview with Australia’s ABC News published in August 2024, Cave opened up about losing his two sons.
Prior to their deaths, Cave said he was “in awe of my own genius,” but his perspective shifted in the face of so much loss. “I just saw the folly of that … disgraceful sort of self-indulgence,” he said.
“I’m a father and I’m a husband and a grandfather and a kind of person of the world,” he added. “These things are much more important to me than the concept of being an artist.”
Cave is also father to 25-year-old Earl, Arthur’s twin, whom he shares with wife Susie Cave, and Luke, 34, whom he had with his ex-wife Viviane Carneiro.
The Red Hand Files became a lifeline as he dealt with the grief over his sons.
“The basic response to personal tragedy [is] to sort of shut down and harden around the absence of somebody,” he told ABC News. “And this just kept me open.”
He continued, “We eventually absorb, or rearrange ourselves, so that we become creatures of loss as we get older; this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings.”
