Grief does not follow a timetable, and it does not lend itself to easy answers. In the work we do with families, we hear again and again how isolating it can feel — as though the rest of the world has moved on while you are still standing in the same place. Sometimes the most comfort comes not from advice, but from knowing that someone else has found the words.
Nick Cave on grief and love
In 2018, the musician Nick Cave answered a question on his blog, The Red Hand Files, about whether he ever felt he was in touch with his son Arthur, who died in 2015. His reply has been shared widely since — and for good reason. It is one of the most honest and quietly consoling things written about love and loss.
“It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe.”
You can read Nick Cave’s full reply at The Red Hand Files.
Why these words resonate
The idea that grief is “the terrible reminder of the depths of our love” reframes something almost unbearable into something that makes sense. It does not make the pain smaller. But it gives it a reason — and for many people in the immediate weeks after a death, that is precisely what is needed.
Grief is frequently described as something to be managed or moved through. Books on bereavement talk about stages and timelines. But Nick Cave’s framing dispenses with all of that. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is the price of having loved deeply — and the depth of the grief tells you something true about the depth of the love.
When words help
Many families find that words — a poem, a passage, a line from a letter — become anchors in the weeks after a death. Something to return to. Something that says: yes, this is what it feels like, and you are not alone in feeling it.
Those words can find a place in a funeral too. A reading chosen from something the person wrote or loved. A line included in the order of service. A quote on a memorial card that the family can carry with them. The right words, placed in the right place, become part of the record of the day — and something people reach for again long after the service is over.
A funeral as an act of love
If grief and love are inseparable, then a funeral is itself an act of love — the last organised expression of it. The care a family puts into the music chosen, the words spoken, the stationery designed, the photographs gathered: all of it is grief made visible. None of it brings the person back. But it marks, as honestly as human beings have ever found a way to mark, that this person was here, and was loved, and will be missed.
Other voices on grief
Nick Cave is not alone in having written about loss with unusual clarity. C.S. Lewis kept a journal in the months after his wife died — published as A Grief Observed — in which he described grief as “not a state but a process.” The distinction matters: a state is something you are in; a process is something moving through you, however slowly. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking captures the particular disorientation of sudden bereavement — the way grief distorts time and makes ordinary thinking feel impossible. Julian Barnes, in Levels of Life, wrote about the death of his wife with a directness and lack of self-protection that many readers have found both difficult and deeply comforting.
None of these writers make grief smaller. But they give it shape and company. If you are in the middle of it, finding that someone else has been there — and has found words for it — is its own form of help. It tells you that what you are feeling is not pathological. It is the expected consequence of having loved.
If you are looking for practical support, our guide to grief and bereavement includes a directory of specialist organisations and helplines.
We work with families across the UK to create bespoke orders of service and memorial stationery that reflect the person who has died. If you would like to talk about what you have in mind, call us free on 0800 612 6484 or send us a message.
