by Mick Rhodes | editor@claremont-courier.com

My interest in loss and grief began soon after my marriage disintegrated in 2013. A “conscious uncoupling” it wasn’t; it was ugly, and a heartbreaking by-product was an intensely strained relationship with my middle daughter, who was 11 at the time.

I’d been a stay-at-home dad for more than a decade. Raising my three young ones was everything. I was exactly where I wanted to be. My life had purpose.

When the bomb went off in my marriage, I was unprepared for the fallout. Things got very bad, very fast. It was the first time I’d felt true depression. I saw a therapist. He explained that, no, the unrelenting pressure in my chest was not a heart attack, it was grief for the loss of a life that had felt so unshakable, so solid, for so long. There were times when I wondered if I would live through it.

I read up. I listened to my best friend Christy, who always gave the finest advice. I talked to my therapist and other friends.

Through the trauma and eventual recovery I became fascinated by how people dealt with loss and grief. At first I suppose it was an effort to feel part of something, to be with other once shattered folks who had learned to put themselves back together.

Over the course of several years and with a lot of hard work, things got better. My relationship with my daughter was mended, and that once yawning chasm was again solid ground.

I was grateful to have gained this education when my mother died in 2017. We knew it was coming for the better part of a year. She suffered for several weeks, terribly in the final days, so when she finally left us, it made sense somehow.

I knew the grief was coming too, and thought I was ready. But it was different from the death of my marriage. There was no rebuilding to work toward, no hope for healing. She was gone. Again, Christy was my primary guide. She told me so many times there was no easy fix, that I had to “sit with the grief.” So I did. Part of that process involved talking to others who had lost their parents (my father had died in 2002). Many of these people repeated a version of, “You never get over it; you just learn to live with it.”

This has turned out to be a durable truth.

I mourned my mother’s death. But after a year or more of just feeling the sorrow of her absence, it began to change. I realized how lucky I’d been to have had her for 53 of her 73 years. All of us — my kids, my wife Lisa, and me — had never stopped talking about her, but at some point our discussions began taking on a lighter, more joyful tone. Nearly 10 years on now, we still talk about her all the time. And we laugh a lot, because mom was very funny. The grief remains, but it’s transformed into something beautiful. I welcome it now.

In the weeks prior to Christy’s sudden death on January 4 I had rekindled my fascination with loss and grief. It started after I began listening to the new season of Anderson Cooper’s fantastic podcast, “All There Is.” This podcast was a revelation for me when I began listening in late 2022.

In December, Cooper had on one of my favorite songwriters, Nick Cave, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I’d been a fan since 1981, when I fell hard for his groundbreaking former band, The Birthday Party.

Cave’s interview astounded me. I was aware he had suffered through the unimaginable loss of both his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, and another son, Jethro, at 31 in 2022. It seemed miraculous that he showed empathy and love for the world at precisely the time when he might have been expected to be raging at it. The interview delved deeply into Cave’s 2022 book with Sean O’Hagan, “Faith, Hope and Carnage,” which was released just four months after he lost Jethro, and his stunning 2019 album, “Ghosteen,” which was written and recorded in the aftermath of Arthur’s death. I purchased the book and immediately began devouring it.

I found “Faith, Hope and Carnage” deeply moving, surprising, and ultimately inspiring. Cave had not avoided the grief over the loss of Arthur (the conversations that make up the book took place prior to his second son Jethro’s death) but had folded it, and him, into his life in every way imaginable. Arthur was dead, but he was with him. He spoke to him. Cave’s art, and really his every move, was informed by him. It was an active, ongoing relationship.

Cave said Arthur’s shocking accidental death — he fell from a cliff close to the family home in Brighton, England — was at first accompanied by more than a year of debilitating sadness and grief, an abyss from which he wasn’t sure he or his wife Susie would ever emerge. The catastrophe changed the way he viewed everything. He talked in detail about how it left him not angry at the world, but more entranced by it than he’d ever been.

It blew my mind.

“[T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days,” Cave says in the book. “It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

Cave said his and Susie’s joy was as an act of defiance in the face of grief. This resonated with me, weeks before Christy’s death.

“And I think Susie and I are acutely aware of the precarious nature of not only our lives, but all lives — their rareness, their preciousness — and that it can all disappear in an instant,” Cave says in the book. “In the light of that knowledge, we find gratitude to be a simple and essential act. And Arthur showed us that — the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world. Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us.”

I don’t believe “everything happens for a reason,” but I am profoundly grateful for the synchronicity that put my head — and especially my heart — in “Ghosteen” and “Faith, Hope and Carnage” in the weeks leading up to Christy’s death.

And in this time of deep personal and collective grief, I find defying the forces of darkness with joy and optimism to be a beautiful concept to aspire to. I hope to be strong and brave enough to embrace it. I know Christy would have wanted that for us.