Nick Cave has opened up about the dreams his wife Susie still has of searching for their son Arthur, 11 years after his death.
For more than a decade, grief has sat at the centre of Nick Cave’s work.
Since the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, it has shaped albums, films, interviews and, perhaps most directly, Cave’s deeply personal exchanges with fans through The Red Hand Files.
Eleven years on, Cave has marked the anniversary of Arthur’s death with another quiet reflection on loss, revealing that his wife, Susie Cave, still dreams about searching for their son.
The musician was responding to a short message from a reader named Jane, who wished Cave and his family “much love and strength on this day”.
Writing from a small hotel in Nîmes, France, Cave described the town slowly waking outside his window ahead of a show at the city’s amphitheatre.
There were cars moving through the square, a woman walking her dog, a child on a scooter and an old man smoking on a bench.
Against the significance of the date, it was a strikingly ordinary scene.
“I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won’t be,” Cave wrote.
He acknowledged that the anniversary marked “the worst day of our lives”, while the world around him remained beautiful and continued to move forward.
Cave then described Susie waking beside him and telling him she had dreamt about Arthur.
Arthur, he explained, often returns to her in dreams.
“The dreams are simple, poetic,” Cave wrote.
In this one, Susie was somewhere dark, perhaps in a wood, calling for Arthur. It was too dim to see, and she could not find him.
Cave described grief as something that continues to live within the body, gathering around particular dates and shaping people in ways they may never fully understand.
“These feelings of loss drift through our bodies like ghosts,” he wrote. “They settle in our cells, in our blood, gathering around days like this like weather patterns.”
Arthur died in 2015 after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton.
In the years since, Cave has become one of music’s most candid writers on grief, particularly through The Red Hand Files, where questions from fans often lead to deeply personal reflections on death, faith and the difficult process of continuing to live.
His latest response offers no simple resolution.
“It is a sad day. I can see it in my wife’s eyes,” Cave wrote. “But it is an ordinary day too, a beautiful day. The best day.”
The entry closes with Susie standing at the window, pulling back the curtain and looking out across the town, sunlight on her face.
Eleven years later, the loss remains. The world, quietly, continues around it.
Read more on The Red Hand Files here.
