It’s been a difficult week with some bad news in our family. I’ll spare you the details, but we’ll all be alright. Not to worry. At tricky moments I find it helpful to remember that things are rarely as bad as they seem. The flip side is they’re also rarely as good as they seem during the good times, too. It’s important to me to try to maintain a sense of non-attachment to life’s ups and downs. At the same time, I do try to enjoy the good times, without getting too carried away.
A friend of mine recommended the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett. An interview with the musician Nick Cave focuses on Loss, Learning, and Transcendence. I began it, walking to the subway station in the pouring rain on Tuesday night, and found it very helpful. Mr. Cave lost two of his children. They died. I can’t imagine how hard that is. Even typing it fills me with horror. I hate to compare one’s difficulties to those of another person but in the grief stakes Nick Cave beats me, easy. And yet, listening to him talk about grief as a unifying human condition struck home:
“I mean, there’s personal loss and the sort of obliterating effects of grief, if you actually lose someone, if a parent loses a child, for example, or you lose — Where the loss of someone dear to you impacts on you terribly, and it becomes this obliterating thing.
But I think that there’s also, as you say, a kind of underlying bedrock within humanity, too, of a historical and personal loss that exists. This, to me, this is our condition. This is the common binding condition of what it is to be.
And in that respect, I don’t think the common thread that runs through humanity is greed or power or these sorts of notions. It is this binding agent of loss. That, to me, is the thing that makes me able to look at anybody and feel connected to them, regardless of who they are. And I think there’s a power in that that isn’t really recognized.”
When I moved to America, somebody told me that the biggest fear most Americans have is of dying. There’s a resistance to accepting loss in Western society. It’s one of the drivers of the consumerism, avoiding too much existential thought. But as 2024 begins, I’m feeling some grief and uncertainty. Both for things I’ve lost and for America, and for the world. When one reflects on the feeling of loss as, in some way, unifying, then it loses some of its power. Nick Cave also talked about the surprising energy that came about because of his grief. How it relates to empathy.
“I think that there was a sort of zeal attached to grief, of seeing the world in a completely different way. I don’t see the world in the same way as I did before. It’s much more complex than I thought and much more fragile. And this creates a different feeling towards people in general. I found, anyway. I hear that a lot, that grief and empathy are very much connected, in the same way as loss and love are very much connected, too. And that the common energy running through life is loss, but you can translate that into love too, quite easily. They’re very, very much connected. And that comes around from an understanding of just how fragile and vulnerable and precarious the nature of life seems to be.”
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I will say that I’ve observed a common response to the beginning of this year, and it’s that humanity is…in a bit of a pickle. There have been some missteps. We have lost some important things. I realize we have been through dark times throughout history and that we have emerged from them, too. I am curious to see where we end up at the end of this year. We’re going to need to dig deep and have some faith and confidence. I know that. Meantime, I hope you’ll give the podcast a listen if it intrigues you. I enjoyed it, even though it was quite hard work. My mother used to say that about me. “He’s hard work, but he’s worth it.” And I’ve always rather enjoyed that as a character assessment. Thanks, mum! And thanks, Nick Cave, for your insights on grief and loss. I appreciate them.
