a staccato pattern of living.

a note on snow, chemo, & nick cave | + lists, links, & recs <3

Dear ones, 

Before I get into the note I felt compelled to write to you this week, I want to share something I heard Nick Cave say in his interview on the On Being podcast. Cave is a beloved musician who has been creating dark, moody post-punk records since the late 70s. I was introduced to him in high school, on a mixtape, through the song “Into My Arms”; I was transfixed with his impossibly low voice, and how the simple but profound lyrics coalesced into what I’d consider to be one of the greatest love songs of all time. Cave is known for making unusual and superb art and for being weird— he was doing ‘lifestyle-Goth’ before that was really a thing. But what he’s also known for now is grief: he lost two sons, one who was 15, the other 31. During his interview on the spiritual, NPR-crowd podcast, Cave tells the host that it was never his plan to be on a show like this. “Things just changed, and I found myself in this weird situation. I was quite happy being a musician and talking to Rolling Stone and Mojo about the latest record, or whatever. I was quite happy doing that. And in some way too, I think a lot of my fans were quite happy that that’s what I was doing.” 

What Cave is naming here is how grief impacted his art, which is also his life. How he was doing just fine with his whole broody musician thing, but then, boom, suddenly he’s consumed with this entirely backwards experience of losing young people, his own two children, and it’s all he can really write or talk about. Suddenly he’s doing gentle spirituality podcasts more than Rolling Stone interviews. 

I have not lost two children, but I have had my world upended by grief, and also, more recently, with a closer confrontation with death and dying than I’d really ever had before. Cave said a lot of powerful things in this interview — (at one point he talked about “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering”....I mean!) — but this brief aside about how he didn’t want to be talking about his dead sons, but that he didn’t really have a choice, landed so hard. I have felt, for almost exactly two full years like my writing has been swallowed by hard things: the overwhelming grief of leaving my long-term relationship; the despair of falling in complicated love again, across an ocean; the stress of economic insecurity; and then, now, confronting P’s technically-incurable cancer. This has meant that what I’ve been writing to you for two years has been heavy. “Grief makes demands of you,” says Cave, which of course means grief makes demands of our art. 

All of this is to say, I didn’t want to write you another note about a horribly stressful day, that was in part about cancer, and in part about driving; I have just lamented about both of those things recently, and what is starting to feel like too regularly. How many notes have you read from me that are some version of, “Things are hard right now”? So many! And for this, in the same way I think I heard in Cave’s voice, I kind of want to apologize. It was never the plan to have so many stories that begin with sorrow, frustration, and pain…but our circumstances make demands of us. 

I know it is unlikely that I am disappointing anyone by writing about the hard stuff, and that in fact it may be extremely helpful to some readers. But before I hit send on another story about how overwhelmed I’ve been with the now-quotidian happenings of troublesome vehicles and cancer-related obstacles, I just wanted to tell you first how I related to a world-famous post punk bereaved father, and the thought processes that surround the art we make in uneasy times. 

So with that, here is what I wrote on Wednesday, about Tuesday (with hearty recommended links below):