Nick Cave Refuses To Focus On His Own Wounds After Losing His Sons

Nick Cave recently opened up about grief and revealed what he believes grief is. During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, while talking about grief and resembling it to love, he admitted that he refused to focus on his pain after losing his sons and concentrated on himself and his music instead.

Cave lost his son Arthur in 2015 after he fell from a cliff in Sussex at the age of 15. Following his passing, he also lost his oldest son, Jethro Lazenby, in 2022 with an unknown cause of death.

The singer was asked whether or not he believes in ‘acceptance’ as the final stage of grief according to the Kübler-Ross model. The five stages of the model include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, which Cave thinks is ‘full of sh*t.’ He shared his thoughts on grief:

“Grief, like love, is a mess. Grief manifests as awesome and Godlike. It was not about ‘acceptance,’ which suggests a kind of ultimate returning to business as usual, rather it is an obliterating force that requires a kind of transmutation of being, where we turn from one thing into another thing.”

The rocker decided not to focus on his own ‘wounds’ after the grief he has been through.

“The experience of losing my two sons was a reordering of one’s essential being. Ultimately, if we are lucky, we stop focusing on our own wounds and look to the wounds of the world.”

Cave believes that experiencing grief makes people value things and people and admitted that his experience with losing his two sons has been the same.

His grief didn’t stop him from maintaining his music career; in fact, it helped him shape it through albums. In his Bad Seeds albums, ‘Ghosteen’ and ‘Skeleton Tree,’ the rocker dealt with the grief of losing his younger son.

Below, you can give ‘Ghosteen’ a listen.