Nick Cave on Living with Loss and the Central Paradox of Grief as a Portal to Aliveness

“The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains… a luminous super-presence.”

Perched near the untimely end of a life strewn with losses, contemplating what remains when a loved one vanishes into “the drift called the infinite,” Emily Dickinson wrote:

Each that we lose takes part of us;

A crescent still abides,

Which like the moon, some turbid night,

Is summoned by the tides.

I too have waded through the tide pool wit...