ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING

“In these days of platitudes and sloganeered answers to all of life’s complexities, what the film really does, and this might just be it’s greatest gift to us all, is to offer something rare: it faces grief in all of its rawness and doesn’t “fix” it. Much like Christopher Hitchens challenging the notion of “fighting cancer,” Cave faces the loss of his son, not by crying out to God, or overcoming the demon of loss and emerging triumphantly as the conqueror of grief. Instead, with candor, honesty and deep pain, Cave acknowledges that there are events in life that change you, perhaps forever, changes from which you will never recover. “Time has become elastic,” he says.  You stretch away from the event but you are always snapped back to that moment when your life changed. The challenge then, and the gift Cave offers, is to remind us that surviving such loss is about figuring out, again and again, how to live with the unknown person the event has turned you into.” – Read the rest of Barry Taylor’s reflection on Nick Cave’s extraordinary meditation on grief, in issue #1 of The Porch, available to subscribers here. And if you haven’t already subscribed, you can do that here.