There’s a lot of silence in times of grief.
We lack words to express what we feel.
We lack the capacity to bear what the grieving express.
I think living with grief gives a context in which a language to express feeling, and an ability to hear what the grieving say, can develop.
If we reflect, and perhaps oddly, if we don’t fill the space too quickly with words and plans.
From Nick Cave.
To be forced to grieve publicly, I had to find a means of articulating what had happened. Finding the language become, for me, the way out. There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It’s not something we are practised at as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it’s too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves.
Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, The Text Publishing Company, 2022, pgs. 44
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