Riding The Wave of Pain: loss, grief, migraines, and Nick Cave

Let us go now, my one true love

Call the gasman, cut the power out

We can set out, we can set out for the distant skies

Watch the sun, watch it rising in your eyes 

Distant Sky, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

I started writing this essay in my head on Monday, October 22nd, while driving to meet my friend Christy for lunch. The sun was high in the sky; it was 12:50 pm. 

The night before, Ben and I had seen Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds live, at The Forum, in Los Angeles. The show was so beautiful, meaningful, and inspirational that when I woke up the following morning I felt emotionally hungover; that’s why, in the car on my way to lunch, I listened to Distant Sky, from Cave’s album Skeleton Tree. I wanted the emotion from the night before to linger as long as possible, and to transform the memory into a written reality. When music helps me understand life I call it revelation, the narrative it helps me access is a gift.   

So not unexpectedly, as the song played, images flashed in my head without a precise order or pattern — they were more a representation of a feeling I couldn’t yet define. There were images of my grandmother’s house, of a man dying and of his widow at home alone, images of Malibu at twilight, images of loss. There was death, there were dark skies and agitated oceans, but also heavy clouds that moved away after the storm. As the song kept playing I knew immediately where I wanted this story to go, or rather where this story was meant to be headed. Words poured down on me like autumn rain, even though there wasn’t a single cloud in sight on that warm October day. More and more, autumn in Los Angeles feels like summer; the leaves do attempt a change of color, but nothing else does — only the air flirts with the winter season in the evening, when it seems to be wearing the perfume of fall as the noise of the city diminishes, people wear loafers, and the lights in every house come on, turning the valley into a nativity scene.  

The final notes of the song came, and a lump in my throat prevented tears from falling; I was riding the wave of pain. 

When I began to transfer the words in my head into writing, I didn’t know how I wanted to shape this story, one that had originated a few days before seeing Nick Cave, when I had returned from Santa Barbara, and a severe headache had finally gone away. It wasn’t a migraine, but it lasted so long that it felt like one. “The absence of pain is a miracle,” I had thought at the first euphoric sign of relief, “I underestimate it.”

Since I wasn’t sure about the shape this writing would take, I decided to let it be, to draw its path on the pager without interfering. Words looked like splashes of black paint on a white canvas with no timeline, order, or premeditated construction. They translated my fleeting understanding of the human condition in a moment of despair, my understanding of pain, and of its vital role in life. 

I will go back to Nick Cave. 

Ben and I returned from Santa Barbara, where we had spent a few days with Catherine, on Thursday, October 19. The Santa Ana winds were still blowing strong, and I could feel my body bending to accommodate their influx, their force. My head felt heavy; I was tired, and a few hours into their vortex, the headache took over. But it wasn’t a regular headache: my bones hurt, my eyes could barely stay open, they were warm and feverish, my neck was stiff, and I was nauseous. I was so tired that I even lay down in the afternoon, which is unusual for me. My jaw was clenched, my muscles tense, and I felt as if my entire body was fighting the wind, the heat, the dust, the pain. 

I woke up on Saturday feeling much better, and I began to think about how, at times, I take for granted the absence of pain. Do I realize the miracle of life when I don’t hurt, whether physically or emotionally? Do I need pain in order to appreciate its absence? I took notes of these questions and considered writing a blog about it, then I moved on.

“A few years ago, when I lived on Beachwood,  I was having terrible migraines, very frequently,” I said to our friend Hattie, who came over for lunch that same day. Beachwood Dr. is an area of Los Angeles where I lived before moving in with Ben, up in the Hollywood Hills, not fat from the Griffith Observatory. “One day, during an episode, I stopped fighting the pain and just allowed it to be,” I continued. I remember that day as if it were yesterday: I was lying in my bed, that stood against the window from which I could see the Hollywood Sign in the distance. It was a winter afternoon, my bedsheets were purple satin, an old desk I had found on the street to my left, and an Ikea nightstand to my right. 

With Hattie, we were talking about physical pain, so I shared with her and Ben how riding the wave of the migraine had helped me deal with it. It had also occurred to me that the day before I hadn’t ridden the wave, but fought it until I had finally fallen asleep. 

“I think I had read something about it by Joan Didion” I said, “so one day I just tried to do something different from the usual, silent complaining.” 

By doing so, I had realized that by fighting the migraine I was adding the frustration of the fight to the actual physical pain. Basically, I was wasting energy rejecting a reality that would exist anyway, whether I accepted it or not. But by riding the wave of the migraine, I embraced the pain, I became the pain and I distanced myself from it at the same time to observe it reach its peak, and to ultimately watch it diminish, diminish, diminish, until it disappeared. 

I don’t always remember to do that, and I try to do the same with the emotional pain, but being its nature often blurry, not something I can label and define, I struggle to just accept it, whether it’s sadness, anger, despair, or disappointment. When I do, however, when I observe its wave rising, reaching the peak, and decreasing to then vanish, I am able to learn something from it. I suffer less, and instead of running against the winds I accommodate their direction and wait. 

When I was newly sober and I was going through a challenging time, I dear friend had suggested I’d read page 417 of Alcoholics Anonymous in times of trouble. It was January of 2013:

“Acceptance is the answer to ALL of my problems today.

When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation- some fact of my life- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.

Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept my life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.”

The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous

Hattie left; Ben and I got ready for Nick Cave’s show. 

“One thing I don’t want is people having to come along and involve themselves in someone else’s drama. I don’t want the shows to be like that. I want the shows to be uplifting and inspiring and for people to walk away feeling better than when they came, not some sort of empathetic contagion that goes through the crowd and people walk out feeling like shit,” Nick Cave said to Mark Mordue for the Guardian, in 2017. 

By the time we had found our seats I was’t thinking about the conversation with Hattie, but the concept of pain had been on my mind nonetheless; I knew that his show would be heavily based on his last record, Skeleton Tree, the one he wrote in the wake of the death of his son Arthur, in 2015. 

Everything was about to come full circle. Reality was about to make sense*. 

His performance, in fact, was the musical manifestation of what I had called the wave of pain. His show started with a moving invocation, continued to the peak of suffering accompanied by what clearly helped him surrender — sense of humor and love — and ended with hope, with transformation, with acceptance. Have you noticed the pattern?

When I was in the car heading to lunch with my friend Christy listening to Distant Sky, I wrote this essay in my head because it is through acceptance that I am able to evolve and move forward. But am I the only one to think that there is a harrowing side in the accepting process? Am I the only one that struggles to come to terms with human resilience? Am I the only one to think that pain and grief, at times, seem the easier choice? I think that the burden they carry before giving way to relief is the implication (or the threat), that pain will come again because we have the ability and the tools to make it through and keep going, because we are resilient. I think that there is a part of me that doesn’t always want to keep going. “Hey, you re resilient,” life seems to say every time we lose a loved one, every time cancer happens, an earthquake, rape, a disappointment, a moment of hurt, “you can take this, you’ll move on and be stronger!” Two dear friends of mine have recently lost their husbands; witnessing the courage and the strength with which they carry their head high and keep moving forward is at once inspiring and terrifying. I think there is a part of me that doesn’t want to get stronger, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to have the tools to deal with loss.

But it is through the experience of pain, of that lump in my throat, of the discomfort and the helplessness, the fear and the confusion, that I can write and share my own narrative. It is through the experience of suffering that I can face my feelings and understand that what I am experiencing is “just” life. Words don’t have to necessarily flow to make sense, I know this essay doesn’t flow like a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, neither does my new book. For there is no beginning and no end, they are the same thing, they coincide, they collide, they are one. I will hurt again and I will smile again. I will cry again, and I will smile some more; I am the wave, and a wave never dies, never is born. A wave keeps moving, rising and falling, rising and falling, never consuming. Isn’t everything a wave? Hunger, excitement, an orgasm, sleep, human existence. 

When I listened to Nick Cave in the car feelings rained down on me; I transformed them into words hoping someone would understand, connect, find comfort, and accept. 

***

While I waited for the light to turn green at the corner of Canoga Avenue and Victory Boulevard I played the song one more time because I wanted to understand the nature of the feeling I was experiencing; it was so strong that it felt as if the lump in my throat that prevented me from crying had enveloped my entire body so that I could surrender to it. I closed my eyes and saw myself in an empty church. I saw my grandmother, the bedroom where I used to sleep when I visited her, the view of the castle from the window near the bed, the elementary school, the mountains of my hometown, the cemetery, the ocean, myself with gray hair and a shawl over my shoulders, cold, sunset, a black an white movie, the love story between the ghost of a sea captain and a beautiful woman — then night came, and the morning awaited. 

I saw all of that in the few minutes between the red and the green of the traffic light — it was as if time had stretched to accommodate the writing of this essay in my head. 

When the light turned green I turned left, drove some more, and walked into the restaurant. 

Let us go now, my only companion

Set out for the distant skies

Soon the children will be rising, will be rising

This is not for our eyes

 

Distant Sky, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

• *”Making Sense of Reality” is the title of my new collection of essays in search of a publisher.

https://youtu.be/Rk5gRVvf4Yc