On 14 July 2015, Nick Cave’s life changed irrevocably when his 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling from a sea cliff near the family’s home in Brighton. The grief this unleashed was absolute, immersive, a brutal upending of both body and soul that Cave remembers with devastating clarity: “Grief was pounding through my body with an audible roar, and despair was bursting through the tips of my fingers… We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.” From the outset, and whether he liked it or not, Cave’s grief was a public affair. He and Susie, his fashion designer wife of 23 years, were forced to issue a brief public statement appealing for privacy after the death of their “beautiful, happy, loving boy”. You dearly hope the tabloids respected it.
