Dr Fleischman rather eccentrically operates on the fowl, trying to remove the buckshot. But the bird dies. And Joel is despondent. At the local bar, he is consoled by the waitress, Shelly. “When things get gnarly, Dr Fleischman,” she says, “it’s best to do the sad thing. Don’t be afraid to salt your oatmeal with your tears.” The fact is, Joel loved hunting: the primal experience of tracking his prey, of being outdoors, of sleeping under the stars. “And the killing,” he tells Shelly, “The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn’t take.”

I think of that line each time I hear about Canada’s MAiD policy which is vigorously putting an end to dying. There is a clear distinction between killing and dying, and between dying and death. In that episode of Northern Exposure, the bloodlust of killing is turned to compassion when Joel encounters the dying bird. Dying elicits his compassion in a way that death does not. Death causes grief, but bearing witness to dying moves him deeply. The Greeks had a few words for compassion. What Dr Fleischman seems to experience is splagchnizomai, which means literally to be moved in your bowels. This gut-wrenching compassion can spur one into unexpected action — such as operating on a wounded duck.

Perhaps this old episode has stayed with me because it is interwoven with my memory of my grandmother’s dying. It was slow. She had many strokes, but she had a strong heart. She lingered, and she suffered, and the family suffered, too, as we watched. I was 13, and then 14. My mother would insist that I visit her. It was frightening and depressing. Grandma would usually be unconscious. Her mouth would hang slack. She was skinny, and her breathing was always raspy. Occasionally she would be awake. But she couldn’t speak. I am not sure if my being there had any measurable effect on her at all. It may even have disquieted her.

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But being there had an effect on me. There are not many places a teenage girl would less rather be than in a hospital by the bedside of a dying old lady. It smelled. I would hear other patients moaning. I felt awkward. Painfully so. Do I hold her hand? Talk casually? Remind her who I am? During these visits I acutely felt the desire to flee. If splagchnizomai is about being moved to action as a gut-response, I was being moved to avoid the suffering. But I could only sit there. It was a long wait to the end.

Those awkward, painful moments deepened me. I didn’t grow comfortable with suffering, but I grew comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was obliged to witness suffering, which is distinct from the pain of grief, and so her dying laid a demand upon me. It forced me to be connected to her, to suffer with her. It compelled me to learn about duty. I’ve realized, only in hindsight, that this burden was a gift. I learned, in part, how to suffer, and that suffering should not be done alone. There are more important things than ease.

A friend of mine who works as a chaplain at a Canadian hospital spends his life doing such sitting. He is witness to about one death a day. Most dying, he tells me, is like my grandmother’s: slow. Very often it is even gentle. Still, we don’t all die well, he’ll tell you. We die as we have lived. If you are bitter and resentful in life, you will be more so during your dying. If timid, more timid. If loving, more loving. Dying is frightening, and when we are afraid, we retreat into what is familiar.

When patients speak to the chaplain, they do not typically speak of the pain of dying but that of living. He hears about the sting of betrayal, the hurt of being wounded by someone you love. He hears of the pain of being misunderstood, overlooked, and left bereft. He hears about ordinary, heartbreaking loneliness. And he hears about the torment of guilt, of the wrongs we have inflicted on others. We feel the burn of shame, the ache of remorse. We often endure our own failings only through the dull consolation offered by self-delusion. “Life is pain,” as the classic line goes, “anyone who says differently is selling something.”

We need to be comforted for our living as much as for our dying. And we don’t want to endure the living or the dying alone. When it comes to that, all living is a movement towards the grave, and dying is a kind of intensified living. It only appears that some of us aren’t dying, as my chaplain friend says. Really, he says, we are one body, falling toward death together.

He is not the first to say this. John Donne wrote vividly of dying as a kind of urgent, heightened form of being alive. He was no stranger to death, burying five of his children, as well as his beloved wife Ann, only 33 years old. And in 1623, he grew dangerously sick himself, suffering for 23 days. As he lay near death, he would read the countenance of his physicians for signs of relief or worry (he finds mostly worry) as he submits to their increasingly desperate treatment, such as affixing spatchcocked pigeons to his feet to draw the humors away from his head. He grew in his love for his physicians as they cared for him.

The pigeon-slippers seem to have worked. Donne did not die of this illness; he lived another 10 years. Later, when he was truly dying, he wrote and preached his final sermon: “Death’s Duel.” It is his own funeral sermon, and its focus is on death. It is very different from the reflections he wrote on dying,  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which he rushed to print in 1624 as he felt that his dying reflections would be a gift to others. In Devotions, Donne writes of the compassion he grows to have for himself during his illness, which is not at all the same as self-pity. Compassion allows him to see himself as though from the outside, lucidly, and to love himself without self-deception. Dying also draws him closer to others. On the 17th day of his illness, Donne writes these astonishing words:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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Donne understands that we are all of us falling toward our death. The bell is tolling for you and for me. To hasten death by bringing an end to dying involves me and you. I know that suffering increases, and that dignity, defined as choice and control, recedes during dying. We in Canada are involved in our shared, messy humanity. We seem to cohere around our support for the program, somewhere around 84% of Canadians approve of it. But there is a depth of compassion that can only come from sitting with one whose living is the experience of dying. It is the dutiful, the uncomfortable, the painful, and even, at times, the undignified burden of sharing dis-ease. Dying deepens us in a way that grief does not.

Does it trouble me that almost all MAiD cases, 95.6% of them, are white and middle class, my own cohort? It does. We are either very progressive, believing that burdening loved ones is unethical and limits their agency, or we are keen to defer to experts, limiting our own. But no doctor, no health policy expert, no politician, has more moral authority over death than you or me. Dying has no expert class, no progressive elites. They are not more involved in mankind than you or me.

Other cultures do dying differently. When I would visit an Eritrean friend in palliative care, I was almost never the only one at her bedside. There was a constant vigil kept by other members of her community. This lasted months. Her suffering was great, but it was shared. Only on one occasion was I the only visitor by her bedside. She asked me to read her favorite psalm, a lament by David. She took comfort in David’s suffering: “There is no health in my body,” the Psalm says, “I groan in anguish of heart.” She felt joined with the ancient Hebrew poet, and her suffering was less because of it. She took comfort in humanity’s shared suffering. On that occasion, I left the hospital feeling nourished and cared for. It reminds me still of that Northern Exposure episode, at the end of which Dr Fleischman is literally nourished by the bird that died under his care. “Huh. Not bad,” he says while chewing it.

We are entangled creatures; we are involved with each other. To burden our loved ones by forcing them to act dutifully, against ease, sitting at the side of a dying loved one, is to precisely act with compassion and treat the dying with dignity. It is also to treat the living with a kind of dignity, one that has faith in our capacity to endure the suffering of others, to not flinch from painfully awkward tedium, to be able to endure the burden placed on us by sitting beside someone dying. It is a gift that the dying can bequeath to the living.

Unable to work, the 69-year-old Rhees — a literary and personal executor of Wittgenstein’s estate — relates that he is tormented with guilt, and can make no sense of what has happened. The event becomes an all-consuming obsession: “I am where I am, staying where he is, and I cannot move from there.”

The philosopher goes to Crufts and stares longingly at the Rottweiler competition. He writes letters to friends, fondly recalling how “Danny used to pull me over and drag me at full length for three yards along the ground”. Eventually, he gets another of the same breed, called Tim, hoping this will distract him. Even so, he is unable to leave the dead one behind, and can’t stop calling out for him. “Sometimes when I call Danny, Tim thinks I’m calling him … And yet if I do not keep calling him my life will be a shell.”

These days, Rhees would doubtless be diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder: the question is, which? According to a recent report, something called “PGD” is a good candidate. Arriving in official diagnostic manuals a couple of years ago, Prolonged Grief Disorder is described as a “persistent grief response”, characterized by “intense yearning/longing” on a near-daily basis, and/or “preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased person”. To count as dysfunctional, it has to last for more than a year, in a way that is “clinically significant” — in other words, causing impairment in day-to-day life.

Rhees’s mourning of Danny certainly seems to qualify, but the canonical account says that PGD can only be had in response to human deaths, not pets. This new study, however, protests that this should be extended to animals too, finding that “over one-in-five people who had lost a beloved pet and a person they were close to stated that the loss of their pet was most distressing”. It is indefensible, the study author concludes, to allow that a person might “satisfy all symptom and impairment requirements for PGD, yet be ineligible for diagnosis solely because the deceased was not a member of the homo sapiens sapiens species”.

There is no question that grief for pets can be intense or prolonged. With family dogs and cats, surely it is usually so. Thinking of myself as a dog person, I was blindsided by pain when our cat suddenly died a few years ago. I awkwardly embroidered her name onto a blanket and we wrapped her in it for cremation. I then spent weeks afterwards reading poems and memoirs about cats, trying to conjure her up. As I write this now, there is a void beside my laptop screen where there used to be a feline, aggressively headbutting the edge of it.

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Still, the question is not whether strong grief for pets is ever experienced, but whether it should be. Is it somehow dysfunctional or even morally unacceptable to mourn the loss of animals intensely — perhaps more so than for departing humans? Many would agree, including some bereft pet-lovers, who report embarrassment about their own strength of feeling. And this new study about pet grief answers “sometimes” to the question about the depth of bereavement. It does so not because it presents Rhees-style devastation towards animals, in particular, as being illegitimate. Rather it conceives of any prolonged and life-interrupting grief as mental illness, irrespective of whether its object has two legs or four.

But this general pathologization of lingering grief, treated as something to be medicated or therapized away, looks like another step towards disastrous dehumanization. As so often, features of ordinary life are being made to seem alien and threatening — problems to be managed by supposedly cleverer experts, whom you have to pay. One imagines a therapist talking to Auden: “You seem to be saying that you feel like packing up the moon and dismantling the sun; pouring away the ocean and sweeping up the wood. Have you considered that you might just have PGD?”

In early scene-setting parts of the new study, there are further jargon-filled redescriptions of universal life experiences, treated as if they might well turn out to be apocryphal unless academic psychologists are able to confirm them as real. Though, we are told, “the causal processes” that underlie PGD generally — a.k.a. persistent grief — “are not yet fully understood”, “the end of a close attachment relationship is central to the process”. Moreover, “[t]he empirical evidence shows that the closer the attachment to the deceased person, the higher the risk of developing PGD”.  Truly, this is fascinating stuff.

We are also informed that “the risk of developing PGD is highest following the death of a child and the death of a spouse”. The most obvious thing to yell at the screen here is “OF COURSE IT IS, YOU IDIOTS”. In that desperate scenario, you have just lost someone you loved beyond measure, without whom future life is inconceivable and will never be the same again. Why wouldn’t you be in mental hell for far longer than 365 days in a row? From the most important perspective — that of the person who is suffering the grievous loss — there is nothing dysfunctional about this whatsoever. Lying in bed weeping or staring at the wall may be exactly what the situation requires. It may in fact be a proper recognition of the event’s momentous import.

What this shows is that, despite what some psychologists think, whether or not grief counts as maladaptive cannot be assessed only by reference to its duration. Reference must also be made to the propriety of its object. Wildly lamenting the death of Princess Diana was not remotely dysfunctional for William and Harry, but it was for random strangers. And that brings us back to the earlier question: is there something wrong with feeling deep sorrow of this agonizing kind, not for the loss of your spouse or child but for that of your Rottweiler or Siamese?

Since the intensity of grief is a function of the intensity of love in the background, the answer here depends on a prior question: is it acceptable to love your dog or cat as much as a close family member? A quick answer is that it surely depends on what the pet is like — or indeed the family member. Generally, there is nothing necessarily maladaptive about it, though it is obviously unwise to love a pet in exactly the same way. A pet is not a good emotional substitute for a spouse or a child, despite what millennials and lesbians are said to believe. Thinking of a dog as a reasonable swap for a human relationship is like thinking of a pot-plant as a reasonable swap for a garden: better than nothing at all, but still nowhere near good enough for those who want the garden. A dog isn’t even a reasonable swap for a cat.

Your pet does not need you to celebrate its birthday, buy it cute outfits, or provide it with a memory foam mattress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t love it with the special sort of affection and care entirely appropriate to the sort of being it is. In fact, you may adore an animal precisely because it isn’t human, a welcome respite from all that byzantine interpersonal nonsense. For unlike most of your peers, it will accept love so easily. As Mary Gaitskill points out in Lost Cat — one of the books in which I immersed myself after our cat died — “people often choose pain … An animal will never choose pain; an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human.”

And, if you are lucky, your pet will also return it. Here, too, unwavering animals are gratifyingly different from annoyingly mercurial humans. Part of what tormented Rhees was the thought that he had let Danny down in allowing a second anesthetic: “If I imagine it the other way round — no, I am not being sentimental here — Danny would never have allowed anyone to do to me what I allowed them to do to him. I speak from what I’ve seen him do.”

Some reviewers have treated Rhees’ diary as an embarrassment, interesting only for the philosophical light it obliquely casts on grief generally, whether toward man or beast. But I disagree. After Danny’s death, what the philosopher missed so badly was a particular animal not a substitute human; a beloved being that, in life, had behaved very differently from any human he knew. And as his grief-stricken meditations demonstrate, this sort of attachment can be as intense as love ever gets — in which case death cannot dim it.

It is disarmingly moving to read tales of dogs loyally grieving their masters; so why not tales of masters loyally grieving for their dogs? There is no technical problem for experts to solve here, but there are definitely some lessons about how to be more human. And it seems to me the small ghost purring and nudging my laptop would agree.

For 29 days last year, Slater’s body lay undiscovered on the mountainside. And for those 29 days, his family — most prominently his mother, Debbie Duncan — did everything they could to keep attention on their son, in the hope that he was still alive and might be brought home safely. The kind of attention they got, however, was beyond anything they could have imagined; certainly, it was beyond anything they could control. Slater had become the focus of social media’s “armchair detectives”, for whom his disappearance was not so much a tragedy as a content generation opportunity.

By googling Slater, the armchair detectives learned that in 2021, he had been convicted of violent disorder. Did that fit with the image of the happy-go-lucky young man that Duncan was presenting? The armchair detectives thought not. A GoFundMe to support the family inspired claims from the Miss Marples of social media that the entire thing was a grift, with Slater waiting in hiding until he could reemerge and pocket the lot. (The family says they used the money to fund a private search team and cover their own expenses while in Tenerife.) Or maybe he was dead, but his family had killed him in order to pull off the scam: Duncan was accused of murdering her own son.

Now, Duncan is campaigning for “Jay’s law”, which would in theory protect families like hers from social media trolling. Like most “apostrophe laws”, it feels misbegotten: laws on malicious communications, stalking and harassment already exist, and marking out a special class of victim here would do little to help. Nonetheless, she has the support of her MP, because it’s very hard not to sympathize with what Duncan has been through. Effectively, she’s had her son taken from her twice over. First he died, and then the “armchair detectives” hijacked him.

Of course, if you are one of those “armchair detectives”, it’s actually very easy not to sympathize with Duncan. If you allow yourself to be absorbed into the vortex of true-crime TikTok, where the Slater case continues to do significant numbers, you’ll enter a parallel world in which the only certain thing is that Debbie Duncan can’t be trusted. I watch one young female influencer insisting that “anyone can see [the family’s story] doesn’t add up”: her videos offer wildly conflicting speculation about Slater’s death. As for Duncan’s pleas to be left alone, they receive short shrift. “The family pushed out content themselves,” says the young woman, in a contemptuous reaction video to the Jay’s Law campaign, “but now they want everybody to stop talking about it.”

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Bereaved families are just another species of celebrity. They don’t get to say no. Every parent who loses a child suffers an indescribable private tragedy. But every parent who turns recovering their child into a public quest steps unwittingly into a tangle of pre-authored storylines, and that is especially true for mothers. In 2007, the novelist Anne Enright wrote for the London Review of Books about the widespread hatred for Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter Madeleine disappeared from their holiday apartment in Portugal. Between the still-powerful tabloids, the burgeoning influence of social media, and the incompetence of the Portuguese police (who named the McCanns as suspects on the basis of a highly implausible theory), a strange shadow version of these grieving parents took hold.

As with Slater, there was a missing person, the compelling contrast of holiday pleasure with tragedy, and a silly season news void to fill. Like Duncan 17 years later, the McCanns threw themselves into publicizing the search for their daughter: in the circumstances, what else could they do? Then they were punished abominably for the crime of having their child taken. First, they were judged for leaving their children (including baby twins) in their villa alone while they went to dinner in the resort restaurant, less than 100 meters away. Then they were judged for trying too hard to get their daughter back.

“Disliking the McCanns is an international sport,” wrote Enright, who admitted that she had “disliked the McCanns earlier than most people”. Kate McCann was disliked most of all. She was deemed too beautiful, too groomed, too poised. People damned her for wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair (it was a symbol of hope for Madeleine, she said), for smiling with her twins (the McCanns said they were trying to “stay strong”), and for holding hands with her husband. Kate McCann failed to act as a heartbroken mother was “supposed to”, whatever that might have looked like. (But then, Duncan was later judged for being too scruffy and too common.) Like Duncan, Kate McCann was accused of murdering her own child.

At the bottom of this loathing, Enright realized, was “a recent but potent form of magic”: “Distancing yourself from the McCanns… keeps our children safe.” The more you could prove to yourself that you were unlike the McCanns, the less you had to fear that the same thing could happen to you. There was something affronting about their insistence on being seen. “I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone,” wrote Enright. “In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.’”

The McCanns had unwittingly made a terrible bargain: seeking publicity had been a way to keep the hunt for Madeleine active, but it had also made them famous. As Janice Turner noted astutely in The Times, “in allowing themselves to be creatures of the media, the McCanns have become the Beckhams of grief, prey to the celebrity culture that trivializes all in its wake”. And like all celebrities, the McCanns attracted fans (though “supporters” would be a more tasteful word), haters (like Enright) and obsessives — groups that still persist almost 20 years later, such is the strength of feeling about the case.

At the beginning of this month, a young Polish woman was found guilty of harassing the McCanns. For two years, Julia Wandelt had maintained an Instagram account with the handle “iammadeleinemccann”, through which she promoted her claim to be the McCanns’ lost daughter. She also contacted the McCanns repeatedly, demanding to be acknowledged. That had brought her to the attention of the rival McCann fandoms, and in particular to the anti-McCanns, who tended to claim that the McCanns themselves were culpable in Madeleine’s disappearance. One of them, a Welsh woman named Karen Spragg, was with Wandelt when she accosted Kate McCann in person at the end of last year.

In court, Spragg was described by the prosecution as a “true-crime tourist”; she told police that she believed the McCanns had arranged Madeleine’s abduction. Spragg had befriended Wandelt online and supported her claims. Whether Spragg truly believed Wandelt’s improbable account or not is unclear, but you can easily see how the McCanns’ “rejection” of this imposter Madeleine served the narrative of them as bad, unnatural parents: why wouldn’t they at least want to be certain? (Spragg was charged alongside Wandelt but found not guilty.)

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Watching Spragg smiling as she left the court, it seemed doubtful that her encounter with the law had done anything to cool her obsession. More probably, it had reinforced it: I suspected that, like the Slater armchair detectives, she would probably perceive this attempt to “silence” her as proof that there was something to hide. No matter that the most likely explanation for Madeleine’s disappearance, as with Slater, is the sad, terrible, obvious thing — in this case, an opportunistic snatching by a predator and the disposal of her body. The lure of the conspiracy is too powerful to be quelled.

There are material rewards for influencers in the true crime ecosystem: attention, clout, money (if they monetize their channel). That helps to explain the supply, but not the demand. Why should anyone want to believe dreadful and unlikely things about people like Duncan or the McCanns, when they have already suffered the worst thing imaginable? The answer is, precisely, because they have suffered the worst thing imaginable. To accept that Kate McCann or Debbie Duncan are just like any other mothers would be to accept that what happened to them could happen to anyone.

Which it could. In the real world, a young man can die of one idiotic choice, and a small girl can be lost because her parents were ever so briefly inattentive. In the real world, there is no way to be “good enough” to prevent such horrors: they happen regardless of how virtuous you are. Believing in conspiracist explanations is a literal-minded way of asserting the “just-world fallacy”. It is nicer to tell ourselves that such events can only befall the wicked, and once the wickedness of the bereaved has been assumed, any depraved acts can be attributed to them. Conspiracy-world is a more moral place than the real world, governed by the same reassuringly strict rules of action-and-consequence as a chutes-and-ladders board.

Conspiracy-world is also a more interesting place than the real world. Accidents and abusers are quotidian and grubby. A killer mother, though? That’s a thrilling proposition, a giddily exciting inversion of the expected order where a woman’s function is to love and nurture. The need to hate these mothers of the missing is so profound that the cycle seems irresistible. Regrettably, Duncan is learning, as the McCanns learned before her, that the truth will always be overpowered by the seduction force of a mystery.

My father died at a nursing home in Long Beach, and my mother died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset after contracting Covid-19 in her senior-care residence in Far Rockaway. Her passing was recorded as a hospital fatality. We would later find out that my mom’s death along with thousands of others would be undercounted by the former governor as he infamously said, “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

Now, as Cuomo tries to revive his political career as the next mayor of New York City, I feel duty-bound to recall his lapse in judgment, and what it did to my family.

I first began tracking Covid in December 2019 as part of my job as a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York City. My family was visiting my mother-in-law in Canada over the Christmas holiday, and even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help looking at the news feeds. I read that another “flu-like” virus was causing illnesses in China, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

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By late January 2020, it was obvious that Covid wasn’t your ordinary “flu-like” virus from the People’s Republic like SARS, say. Covid-19 was a disease that no one could hide from. It was a pandemic that would turn all our lives upside down and, in my case, result in an unbearable tragedy.

By early March, Covid was no longer an abstraction. Universities were closing. My oldest son’s concert for the Long Island String Festival Association was canceled two days before the performance. Masks became commonplace in grocery stores and other public settings. Rumors swirled of sweeping lockdowns to come, including at nursing homes like the ones my parents lived in.

The last time I had a conversation with my father was probably 7 March, based on a photo I took from the window of the care center, which shows massive waves crashing along the Long Beach coastline. We talked about the waves, the winter storm that sent the swell, the weather in general.

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Dad had competed in road races since the 1970s as a way to stay and fit and socialize, and he was always aware of what was going on outside. I don’t recall what else we discussed, but I had no way of knowing this was to be our last chat. I visited him one more time, before the lockdowns kicked in, but he was napping, so I decided not the wake him.

I sat at his side for about 15 to 20 minutes, then tidied up his area the best I could, got a quick update from the desk nurse and left. Looking back, I was relieved that he was sleeping, because one-on-one conversations had become more taxing as his dementia progressed. I thought I was getting a one-time reprieve, and the next time I would bring Mom, who lived at a different facility nearby. The poor state of my father’s health precluded him from leaving nursing home-rehab for my mother’s senior care living center, but the plan was to get my dad well enough to join his wife in the double room that we had secured for both of them in the assisted living residence.

I had no idea that I missed my last opportunity to talk to the man who raised me and instilled in me a love of history, athletics for sake of wellness, and personal accountability. I carry that guilt to this day.

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Before the lockdown, it was hard to get my father to eat. But we had no way of knowing how much his health deteriorated behind the closed doors of the lockdown and away from the watchful eyes of visiting family members.

Daily phone calls from staff were cold and inadequate (Dad was incapable of using the phone on his own). I do remember a call I received near the end of March letting me know they were moving my father to a different floor. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. But looking back on it now, I believe it was to make room for the Covid-positive patients, as mandated by Cuomo’s orders. As for Mom, it was much easier to say in touch; she still had her cellphone and we remained in constant contact.

The living center that we chose for Mom was close by, and they agreed to accept Dad when he was released from rehab (Dad’s health was not good enough to be accepted at most other centers). Tragically, they were never reunited, since my father suffered a urinary-tract infection in the summer of 2019, which was the same illness that brought my mother to the hospital a month after Dad.

On 29 March, at around 11 a.m., I received a call from a doctor at Dad’s nursing home explaining that he was running a low-grade fever and that he was lethargic. Three hours later, the same doctor called to tell me that my father had died. The call was professional and brief. To be clear, we don’t blame these facilities. They were following the governor’s health orders.

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to call my mother and tell her that her husband of 60 years had passed. Another pressing issue was that my father’s body had to be removed within a certain number of hours, or they would be forced to send his remains to the county morgue; the clock was ticking.

Our deus ex machina came in the form of a friend from the old neighborhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn: Frankie. He was a funeral director on Staten Island and was closer in age to my older sister, Donna, who put in the call. Frankie promised to get Dad out of there before he was sent to the morgue, which was significant, because these facilities were already overwhelmed with Covid patients who succumbed to the illness, and there was no way of knowing how quickly we could have gotten him out of there for a proper service.

By the early evening, Frankie let us know his nephew was going to pick up Dad and take him back to Staten Island. My sister Donna and I decided to meet him there. I called my good friend Mark, a fellow fireman, who lived nearby, and asked him to come by with whatever uniform he could muster on short notice.

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I found an official FDNY sweatshirt in my house and headed over myself. We weren’t pretty, but this meant my father had an honor guard. We waited in front of the nursing home for Dad to come. We gave my father a proper salute and made sure to put his body bag in the van ourselves — a final show of respect for a man who was a military veteran and a retired member of the Fire Department, having served during one of the busiest eras of fire duty in urban history.

My dad told my mom a while back that he wished to be cremated, so Frankie handled it, and even took my dad home with him, saving me a trip to Staten Island until we figured out what to do with his ashes. An appropriate resting place for my father became available within two weeks.

I got some flowers and headed over to Mom’s care center a couple of days after Dad passed. When I arrived, they were kind enough to let me into the lobby, as there were still no visitors allowed. I handed Mom the flowers, but didn’t hug or kiss her, as I didn’t want to infect her nor anyone else there.

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We spoke through masks from 10 feet away for a few minutes, and I left. As I drove home, the song “Mickey” by Dick Robertson played on SiriusXM’s 40’s Junction station. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that song. I would not expect Dad to be dramatic, but you never know.

As with the nursing-home rehab facility my father had been living in, Andrew Cuomo would also direct Covid-positive patients into assisted-living facilities like the one my mom was at.

About a week after I saw Mom, she said that she wasn’t feeling well. Her symptoms worsened, and she was admitted to the hospital. The day she arrived, we talked several times from her cellphone as she waited in the emergency room or transfer area for a room to open up. On the evening of her second day there, we had our final conversation. The last thing she said to me was to make sure my two boys were given Easter presents on her behalf. The next day, the hospital called to say that my mother had passed away. It was 14 April.

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Frankie continued his work as our angel of mercy. He organized everything he could for us. A church funeral service was out of the question with all the restrictions in place, but he was able to arrange for a burial service at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where my family has had plots for many generations. What I didn’t anticipate was that my mother needed a dress for the burial.

Returning to the apartment where I grew up, on the top floor of the four-story walk-up, felt like strolling through a mausoleum. It was quiet and stuffy. I had been there many times since my parents entered care homes, but this visit felt suffocating. I picked out a dress and some jewelry and made my way to Frankie at his Staten Island funeral home. We hadn’t seen each other in many years, but that neighborhood bond remained strong.

The graveside burial service was held on 18 April. The sky was gray and undecided. Flashes of light briefly broke through the clouds but never held, bathing everything around us in a sepia tone. Donna, my sister, was able to secure a priest from nearby Good Shepherd Parish to perform the service (within days, it would be close to impossible to get a priest, what with so many people dying).

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Frankie also arranged for two US Air Force airmen to attend the service and present an American flag to my family. Donna, my brother, Michael, and I decided that our niece Danielle (Donna’s daughter) should accept the flag. Danielle spent a great deal of time with my parents growing up, and it just made sense. After the service, there was no collation. We couldn’t have a lunch where we could unwind and console each other. We retreated to our respective cars, still wearing our masks, and returned to our homes. It was the best goodbye we could have hoped for, given the circumstance.

Dad and Mom were always “MickeyandDee”, as if they were one entity. The last six months of their lives in care facilities was the only time they were ever separated. Fittingly, Frankie got approval from the director of the cemetery to place Dad’s ashes in Mom’s casket. In the end, they were reunited, and they would spend eternity together, the same way they lived their lives.

Five years later, it’s important to remember that then-Gov. Cuomo’s 25 March nursing-home directive willfully brought disease to the group least prepared to defend themselves against the novel coronavirus. Their only chance was isolation. Nursing homes and similar care centers were the keep in the castle for these seniors. They had nowhere else to run. Instead of putting up barricades and putting up a final defense, Covid was helped through the front by a decree from the man who now wants to lead Gotham.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the lived experience of death. I don’t mean the first-hand testimonies of people who have actually died. If Lazarus told his sisters what it was like to be dead, they did not record it. If Jesus ever described the loneliness of the tomb, his words have been forgotten. No, I mean death as experienced by the living, the survivors.

The experience of death was once far more widely shared. Two hundred years ago, around 15% of babies in Britain died before their first birthdays. “Death borders upon our birth and our cradle stands in the grave”, said a 17th-century bishop of Exeter. Childbirth was dangerous for mothers too. And back then, most people in this country died in their own beds at home, with their families watching. If they did not, if they died on Flanders Fields for instance, their deaths were still not private in the main. But now many people reach adulthood without ever seeing a corpse.

I have seen several corpses, but I did not see the dead body of my husband. For complicated reasons to do with autopsies, transport and distance, neither I nor our children saw him until he was in a sealed coffin in the back of a hearse. I put my hand on his coffin as we filed past it on our way out of the crematorium, but I wish now that I had asked for it to be unsealed. Or that we had gone to the mortuary where he was. If you don’t see that the one you loved is really dead, how can you believe it?

My main feelings when he died were disbelief and a stony sort of shock that left me dry-eyed and clear-headed. And then there were weeks and weeks of paperwork and practicalities that left no space at all to think about my unfinished novel. There was only the haunting fear that by writing a death I had brought a real one into existence. My rational self knew that was not true. Fictions are not premonitions, any more than dreams are. But still.

Even when life returned to something close to normal, I could not write the novel. For a while, I thought about writing a memoir instead, a painfully truthful one, about my husband, my grief and anger, and how complicated mourning is. Truth seemed somehow more relevant than fiction; I kept remembering something novelist Rachel Cusk said in an interview: “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.” I made a start on the unvarnished work I had in mind and then abandoned it almost at once. I knew then that I had had more than enough of me.

If I had written and published that memoir, I would have been asking you, the reader, to sympathise with me. Even, perhaps, to identify with my lived experience of grief. Why should you want to do that? My experience is particular but not in any way unique. If, on the other hand, I could write imaginatively enough to transcend the limits of that experience, to widen it, to bring to it the resonances of other lives, other ways of seeing — well, that I felt would be worth doing. I, as the author, would be opening windows for the reader, not beckoning them to follow me into a shuttered room.

Autofiction — fictionalised autobiography that dispenses with the traditional elements of the novel such as character and plot — is arguably the prevailing literary mode of our time. It suits the general demand for self-revelation in life as well as art: in print, on screens, in public, people share the most intimate of details and bare their souls — or seem to. For years, aspiring writers of fiction have been told to “write what you know”, to stick to their own experience and their own boundaries, and by writing their own lives in thin disguise they are demonstrating their obedience to the rule. This is in many ways a good thing. Care must be taken not to trespass clumsily on territories of gender, racial identity, or sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between unacceptable cultural appropriation and creative imagination. That difference can be described as empathy.

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However carefully curated, whatever balance it strikes between “truth” and “story”, auto-fiction requires ego. It says: look at me, even though what you see may actually be a mask. And it implicitly assumes a degree of mutual recognition between writer and reader. It’s a mirror, not a clear window. This can often be immensely valuable. But how, then, can a reader step outside their own personal experience, to feel as Keats felt when he first read Homer: “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”, breathless with anticipation like Cortez’s men, “silent, upon a peak in Darien”? How, indeed, unless writers can still write of lives beyond their own known and confined realities?

Great writers don’t need lived experience to convey emotion. The psychologist Steven Pinker described an experiment in which people listened to an interview with a heroin addict, who was either a real person or an actor. When the listeners were asked to take the addict’s point of view, they became more sympathetic to addicts in general, even when they knew the interviewee was acting. In other words, they did not need to believe the “addict” was sharing a lived experience in order to empathise. We can see this in William Golding’s astonishing novel, The Inheritors, which takes us into the world of the last Neanderthals and shows us how it feels to be on the wrong side of the cusp of change: disempowered, under threat and fearful. He achieved this masterpiece through an empathetic leap across millennia that owes everything to his brilliance as a writer and his understanding of unchanging human nature, but little to his own experience of life in 20th-century England.

As T.S. Eliot said: “What every poet starts from is his own emotions [but then transmutes] his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” To me, that’s a counsel of perfection, the highest of aspirations. My husband’s death caused me great grief, but when eventually I could write that grief upon the page, through voices that were those of imagined people who lived centuries ago, I hope I turned it into something shared, something that could strike chords in hearts other than my own.

The Book of Days by Francesca Kay is published by Swift Press.

Obviously, after I wrote about her for the Guardian, the locals in our trendy Crouch End park soon got wind of it. They would stop us to ask if Maisie was the “Princess Diana dog” and we would joke about her being harassed by the paparazzi. One humourless reader didn’t really get the joke. He wrote to the newspaper: “Bindel has gone too far this time. That dog looks nothing like Princess Diana!”

But like Diana, Maisie was heartbreakingly beautiful, a Spaniel-Collie cross with a long coat and soulful eyes. Her legs were slightly too short for her body, which made her all the more lovable. But before she came to us, someone had abandoned her. According to her profile on a rescue charity’s website, it said she would be put to sleep the following day unless she was claimed. We did. And we were besotted.

Her reputation — and her bark — soon preceded her. Our local park has a tennis court attached, and Maisie would gallop in and grab a ball, mid-serve. The Crouch End tennis gang were rarely amused. She even made a name for herself in media circles: if ever my partner Harriet or I were doing interviews, Maisie would inevitably bark her head off. Producers would have to decide whether to rerecord the segment or broadcast her voice on Radio 4 or Sky News.

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Maisie brought us joy in private as well as in public. With us, she was sweet, cuddly and affectionate, though she barked at everyone else. And she was insecure. If Harriet and I were sitting together on the sofa, she would try to separate us with her paws. She had never got over whatever had happened to her in her former life. We supported her with her trauma, and she helped us when we needed comfort after a bad day. Harriet, a lawyer, and I both do work that takes us to very dark places, dealing with the detail of the worst excesses of men’s violence. It’s not uncommon for us to be talking about murder, prostitution and child sexual abuse before 8am. But having a creature who would greet us joyfully, blissfully unaware of the terrible things humans are capable of, was always incredibly therapeutic.

And we repaid that joy with love and attention and vast vast vets bills. I’ve never felt more middle-class than when I had to tell an editor that I couldn’t knock out a piece in the next hour because I had to take the dog to hydrotherapy. She had fortnightly appointments ever since she developed arthritis. She also had monthly vaccinations to keep the condition at bay, and check-ups for her kidney disease and pancreatitis. People without pets will howl at the expense, but I had always felt lucky we could afford this sort of care.

Never more so than when we decided we had to euthanise her. She could no longer bound on to the tennis courts to irritate the Wimbledon wannabes; she could no longer negotiate the four steps into the kitchen or out into the garden without help. She had gone off her food. Her kidney failure had progressed and the vet suggested a new course of treatment. “No,” I said. “It’s time for her to go”. My partner and I knew we would rather let her go a day too soon than a day too late. She was 16-and-a-half and it was just before Christmas.

I know people will call me a hypocrite for promoting the value of having a pet, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis. When people are using food banks to feed their children, isn’t it bad taste to be talking about pet food banks? I hear the criticism. And I have made similar arguments myself — railing against donkey sanctuaries getting more funding than domestic violence charities. And, yes, I do think we should prioritise humans. I spend a significant amount of my unpaid time and energy campaigning to keep women and children safe from male violence. But I also donate a fair bit every month to animal charities. I want women to live without male violence; I don’t want donkeys to suffer; I want people to be able to feed their pets. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

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A couple of years ago, I wrote about about people who had to give up their pets because they couldn’t afford basic vet treatment or decent food. I wept with owners who recounted the pain of rehoming their beloved companions, feeling angry that there was little help for them. Things have only got worse since then. Figures released last week by the Dog’s Trust reveal that a record number of people are being forced to give up their pets: the charity received more than 45,000 requests from owners about giving up their animals in 2023.

If I could have kept Maisie alive, fit and healthy forever I would have. But when the time came, the vet came to the house so that Maisie could die in her own bed, with us close by. She was given a sedative, fell into a deep sleep, and then a final injection stopped her heart. She was wrapped up in her favourite blanket and carried out in a wicker basket, while we sat inconsolable, looking at her bowls, her toys, her collar.

I cry about her every day and I have barely slept since she died. Christmas was especially hard: even the cat looked bereft. I would go out for walks on my own, feeling completely weird without a dog by my side. It was so odd to not hear her incessant barking when the doorbell rang. The house has lost its soul. While researching that piece two years ago, I also spoke to experts in bereavement counselling for pet owners. Some might think going to a therapist to get through the loss of a pet is a ridiculous self-indulgence when there’s so much human suffering in the world. But I know now that such loss can bring with it terrible grief, particularly when they have been so therapeutic, as Maisie was for me

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Maybe it was the quietness of the holiday season, but I ended up looking at dogs on rescue centre websites — thinking that, in the future, we would probably get another. Yes, I felt guilt, but I figured there was no harm in looking. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. She was a cross between a springer spaniel and a French bulldog, nothing like Maisie. It was only a couple of days before I surreptitiously emailed the owner, asking for more details. It was a familiar story: family dog gets pregnant, six puppies are born, they all need rehoming.

We brought Ruby home on Sunday, a month after Maisie died. She is four-months-old, and full of energy. I can’t wait for her to start barking, demanding a walk first thing in the morning. I still feel Maisie’s loss like a hole in my heart. But I didn’t want to wait just for the sake of it. I’m a fairly anxious person, an insomniac, and the nature of my work leaves me with invasive thoughts. Being able to spend time with a furry bundle of happiness reduces my anxiety and makes me forget, albeit temporarily, the painful stories stored in my head. Maisie helped me keep doing the work that I do. Now, Ruby will take up the baton — and the tennis ball.

Nick Cave: I do have certain memories of the night Arthur died. Yet when I try to recall what happened after that night, it’s almost like there is a rupture that time and memory poured itself into. Everything disappears.

Seán O’Hagan: People tend not to want to revisit the moment of the actual trauma itself — and probably for good reason. Are you sure you even want to talk about this stuff?

NC: Fuck, I don’t know, Seán. I’m just kind of mystified by how little I remember, just how much I have forgotten.

I remember I was watching TV, and Arthur rings me, and I answer, but it’s not Arthur; it’s a stranger who had found his phone and his rucksack and shoes in a field near the black windmill outside Brighton. The stranger also says that there is police activity at the cliff near the windmill. Then there is this sudden roaring panic, and we are calling 999. Asking the operator what is happening at the cliffs! The police won’t tell us anything.

Then the police come to the house. My wife Susie and I standing on the doorstep, seeing the police car pull up, and the detectives stepping out and walking towards us with their composed faces, and us just knowing. The cops standing in the kitchen and telling us the news — our boy has fallen off the cliff, his body is in the hospital, he is dead, and my head starts roaring the loudest noise in the world…

SOH: I don’t know what to say, Nick. I just can’t imagine . . .

NC: I don’t remember much after that, for quite a while. Mostly, I just recall sitting on the back step of the house away from everyone and smoking and feeling the roaring body shock of it, like this alien force was going to burst out the ends of my fucking fingers. I remember feeling like I was physically detonating, like if I made any sudden moves I’d literally explode, so stuffed was my body with despair. And then sitting next to the bed, with Susie lying completely still in the dark, like a stone, her eyes closed, and saying, “I am here, babe, I’m here,” but really I’m not, I’m not there at all, I’m in a million fucking pieces, everywhere else, all over the place.

SOH: Were you angry at the world after Arthur died?

NC: No, I was in despair. I don’t think anger was part of it. Not for me, although who knows what boils away inside us. Susie, of course, entered a circle of hell that is reserved solely for mothers who lose their children. It’s a whole other level of loss and suffering, a terrible, terrible thing to happen to anyone. There are all sorts of feelings tied up in it, guilt and shame and self-loathing so primal, yet so complex, they are near impossible to unravel. We don’t have the language for it. Or maybe language itself is not up to the task. Perhaps the cultures that encourage people to dress in black and just wail, maybe that is the most articulate response.

I remember, in desperation, reaching across and taking Susie’s hand and feeling the shock of that same violent electricity in her hand. It was so physical. That physical affliction is not often talked about, as far as I can see. We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.

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***

SOH: Nothing prepares you for it. It’s tidal and it can be capsizing.

NC: That’s a good word for it — “capsizing”. But it is important to say that these feelings I am describing, this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact it is ordinary. We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time — that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.

It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really — to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.

SOH: When you are deep in grief, there’s no real comfort to be had in people constantly telling you that time will make things better. But I distinctly remember waking up one morning, having finally had a decent night’s sleep, and thinking, it’s going to be okay. There was a sense that something had shifted imperceptibility. Did that happen to you?

NC: At first there was nothing but darkness, but, over time, Susie and I started to experience something like small fragments of light. These points of light were essentially thoughtful gestures from the people we encountered. We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all — in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared.

Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.

Arthur’s death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person. I am not talking about being a traditional Christian. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt, on a profound level, a deep inclusion in the human predicament, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are, each of us, imperilled. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don’t. I became a person after my son died.

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***

SOH: Back in your younger, wilder days, when you drew on biblical imagery as a source for your songwriting, was that also a reflection of a deeper interest in the divine?

NC: Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with addiction, I always had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. I might wake in my hotel room surrounded by the detritus of a heavy night on the road — empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, maybe a stranger in my bed, all that kind of shit, but also an opened copy of the Gideon’s Bible with passages underlined.

After Arthur died, the world seemed to vibrate with a peculiar, spiritual energy. I was genuinely surprised by how susceptible I became to a kind of magical thinking. How readily I dispensed with that wholly rational part of my mind and how comforting it was to do so. Now, that may well be a strategy for survival and, as such, a part of the ordinary mechanics of grief, but it is something that persists to this day. Perhaps it is a kind of delusion, I don’t know, but if it is, it is a necessary and benevolent one.

SOH: If so, that kind of magical thinking is a strategy for survival that a lot of people use. Some sceptics might say it is the very basis of religious belief.

NC: Yes. Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie — if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood — is, in some way, irrelevant. Sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying — all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness, are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I’ve never let them go.

SOH: I have to say that I am slightly in awe of other people’s devotion. When I go into an empty church, it always feels meaningful somehow — and vulnerable — to just linger there for a moment or so. Do you know Larkin’s poem, “Church Going”, which touches on that very thing?

NC: Yes! “A serious house on serious earth it is.” And yes, there’s something about being open and vulnerable that is conversely very powerful, maybe even transformative.

For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom.

SOH: The two are connected, maybe — vulnerability and freedom.

NC: I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.

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****

SOH: It may be that the most meaningful things are the most difficult to explain.

NC: I do think the rational aspect of ourselves is a beautiful and necessary thing, of course, but often its inflexible nature can render these small gestures of hope merely fanciful. There is a kind of gentle scepticism that makes belief stronger rather than weaker. In fact, it can be the forge on which a more robust belief can be hammered out.

SOH: It’s intrinsically human to doubt, though, don’t you think?

NC: The rigid and self-righteous certainty of some religious people — and some atheists, for that matter — is something I find disagreeable. The hubris of it. The sanctimoniousness. It leaves me cold. The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. The belligerent dogmatism of the current cultural moment is a case in point. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.

SOH: So, just to make sure I’ve got this right: you would like to get past your doubt and just believe wholeheartedly in God, but your rational self is telling you otherwise.

NC: Things happen in your life, terrible things, great obliterating events, where the need for spiritual consolation can be immense, and your sense of what is rational is less coherent and can suddenly find itself on very shaky ground. I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own scepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.

When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.

I think the only way I can fully give myself over to the idea of God is to have the room to question. To me, the great gift of God is that He provides us with the space to doubt. For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief.

SOH: That’s fair enough, I guess, but it’s starting from the premise that God exists and allows us to doubt, which an atheist would argue is essentially flawed logic.What would you say to that?

NC: Well, Seán, since when has belief in God had anything to do with logic? For me, it is the unreasonableness of the notion, its counterfactual aspect, that makes the experience of belief compelling. I find that leaning into these intimations of the divine, that for me do exist, as subtle, softly spoken and momentary as they may be, expands my relationship with the world — especially creatively. Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical.

There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence. I see this as a sort of affliction that is, in part, to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable — in politics, identity and so on.

SOH: But, hang on, are you saying atheism — or secularism — is an affliction? And that you equate it with cynicism? I mean, come on, non-believers can have a sense of wonder at the world — with nature, the universe, with the wonders of science, philosophy and even the everyday.

NC: I am not saying secularism is an affliction in itself. I just don’t think it has done a very good job of addressing the questions that religion is well practised at answering.

SOH: What kinds of questions, in particular, would you say religion is more adept at answering?

NC: Religion deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion — and meaning — elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division.

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SOH: The decline of organised religion may be one reason for that, but there are others, of course, social and political.

Whatever you think about the decline of organised religion — and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for — it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world — an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility. There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence.

Well, I love this world — with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame. In that regard, Seán, I feel as if I am completely and hopelessly out of time.

I don’t know how to exactly say this, and please don’t misunderstand it, but since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many. It is his munificence that’s made me a different person. I say all this with huge caution and a million caveats, but I also say it because there are those who think there is no way back from the catastrophic event. That they will never laugh again. But there is, and they will.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan is published by Canongate

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

It’s a deeply religious project, firmly rooted in the Christian story, conceived and executed by a community of profound faith. So what is it that warms the cockles of my deeply atheist heart? I think it’s the strength of the promise: the coming of hope after a brutal, bitter year. For me, that hope is primarily in the shape of a vaccine being dispensed in hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country.

Is it sacrilegious of me to think of the coming of a vaccine — bringing with it a temporal salvation — as analogous to the coming of Christ? Or is it simply that religious stories work so well precisely because they are the archetypes of so many individual human experiences? I don’t know. But one thing I appreciate about Advent is the way Christianity gives us 24 full days to prepare ourselves for the arrival of hope. After all, if you step out of the dark into the light you will be blinded; you need time to adjust.

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The Covid-19 crisis is not over. But the vaccine does herald the end of the worst; even if this latest surge were to push us beyond the peak hospitalisations of the spring, at least the fear that this is forever has gone. So, as we navigate the next few difficult months, we need to prepare ourselves to step into the light again. Am I the only one who thinks that will be hard?

Launching the vaccine, Matt Hancock said this was “a day to remember in a year to forget.” A beautiful line, of course — but balderdash. We should not forget; we can’t, even if we wanted to. This year has scarred us and bereaved us. We need to grieve what we have lost. The book that’s been helping me do so is Good Grief: Embracing Life At A Time of Death. It is a memoir of the first half of the year by Catherine Mayer and her mother Anne Mayer Bird, who lost their husbands within five weeks of each other around the beginning of this wretched year.

It would be a stretch to call Catherine a friend, but I know her a little and admire her a lot. I’ve been to the flat where many of the events in this remarkable book played out, above the recording studio where her rockstar husband played and recorded his last music. I’ve met, all too briefly, many of the characters whose deaths she recounts, or who help her, sometimes clumsily, to grieve. But it’s the universality of the experience of loss, not its closeness to me, that sticks.

The book as a whole is a metaphor for grief. It’s jumbled. It skips forward in time and back again. The chapters are themed, but messily so, taking you with them through surges of emotion just like those which hit you unexpectedly after the loss of a loved one, just as you’ve decided you’re going to be ok. Its greatest strength is a series of letters from Anne to her dead husband, with whom she wanted so desperately to share the experience of this dreadful year. Written at intervals during the worst phase of the lockdown, they punctuate the book, acting as a trigger for the reader’s own detailed memories of how it felt, then, to be scared, or worse — scared and alone.

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I’ve been finding it hard to remember much of this year. It blurs. We did the same walk in the same park so many times it’s hard to be clear about what happened when. Even specific trips, like the one time we visited my mother, or an eat-out-to-help-out lunch in my hometown, seem to have an ethereal, faded quality. But without memory, there is no healing. Catherine and Anne’s book is a catalyst for all our memory, and a playbook for how to deal with its darker corners.

There are dead people everywhere in Good Grief, brought to life by the stories Catherine tells of them. Some you’ve even heard of like Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. They are not gloomy spectres haunting the text, but the warm spirits of what Catherine calls the “lovely dead”. Catherine and Anne are both advised to leave the homes they shared with their husbands, to escape the memories. But they do not want to escape the memories: they bring them joy. It reminds me of the lines Shakespeare gives Constance in King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Mourners are told this is pathology. This is how you get stuck in grief, and forget to live. But the central message of Good Grief is the opposite: we live well by doing justice to the lovely dead. We live well by making time and space for grief, making it “welcome,” not trying to suppress it. That is how we will do justice to this year, as well: not by pushing our grief away, but by making space for it.

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Unless you are the luckiest person in the country, you have lost something this year. Your freedom. Your peace of mind. Your watercooler moments. Your sense of smell. Your favourite pint. Your club nights. Your income. Your security. Your prospects. Your university place. The list is endless. And our feelings of loss will not go away simply because the experience has ended: they need to be discussed, and processed, and dealt with.

Good Grief helped me to see that leaning into grief is not self-indulgent. Experiencing your loss is the best way to understand what you had; it’s even a way to relive the joy of what was. The dead, of course, can only return in memory. The same is not true of the opportunities to create new memories that we lost in this catastrophe, of course. But it is worth spending time with your grief this winter to help you work out what you want back. Will you keep up the volunteering or the zoom calls with your family? Will you return to the commute? Will you join a campaign for a living wage? For changes to local government funding? Will you eat differently? Will you spend more time in the park? No-one could come through a crucible like 2020 unchanged. How has it changed you?

Since we’ve been told to celebrate Christmas as little as we can, now seems like the moment to ask that question and start to find the answer. Let grief fill up the room, if only for a few hours. Let it walk up and down with you, and see what it says. Matt Hancock got it wrong: this is not a year to forget, but to remember. We will be best prepared for the dawn if we allow ourselves to experience the darkness which precedes it.

Stage one was shock. I didn’t stay up for the count. I went comfortable to bed believing my side would prevail. I woke at 3 and checked the news. I didn’t sleep again: the shock wasn’t about the practicalities or about the policy. It was that I didn’t know my country. Was this my beloved home, suddenly now so unfamiliar?

I couldn’t knuckle down to proper work so I trundled off to Ikea to buy furniture for the new office my charity was moving into. Because what more European place is there than Ikea? They even have the right brand colours: blue and yellow. Just as in Harry Potter the cure for a brush with the dementors is chocolate, so the cure for a brush with the Brexiteers is surely a Swedish meatball.

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Stage two: denial. I spent a couple of months expecting that we would leave but not really leave. So many leavers had said we’d stay aligned, we’d stay close, we’d still have perfect access to the single market and frictionless trade. I believed them. We could just duck out of the institutions of the EU but play along as if little had changed. Boris Johnson himself helped sustain this fantasy — his first article in the Telegraph after the referendum spelled out a vision of our future as the closest of buddies with our erstwhile partners.

Stage three: anger. All that came to a juddering halt when Theresa May gave her Lancaster House speech, full of red lines, incompatible promises and economic incoherence. I raged about David Davis turning up in Brussels without any papers. I was furious with Liam Fox for his pointless job as Secretary of State for Trade-Deals-We-Aren’t-Legally-Allowed-To-Sign-Yet. I drafted and deleted endless bitter tweets at pundits who thought it would be easy to run a Midlands car factory without just-in-time access to goods, simply because they could ski across the Swiss border on holiday.

Stage four: bargaining. This is when the false hope started to dawn. In the psychological literature, bargaining is the stage where you obsess about what you could have done differently — and try to strike a deal with God (or the universe): “I’ll be different, I’ll pray every day, I’ll be kind to my sister. Just make it go away.”

In Brexitland, bargaining was when we devised a thousand strategies to trip us into another referendum, another election, another chance to roll the dice again and get a different answer. I wasn’t part of those campaigns but I dared to hope. “If we stop Brexit it will be because of them, and their intransigence,” I told myself, almost ashamed that I hadn’t stood with them — that I was the sort of capitulator who assumed that a referendum, when lost, was lost.

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Stage five: depression. This started to creep up my spine during December’s general election. The debate was shifting away. The activists in their blue and yellow robes still thought we could stop Brexit but the voters didn’t. They wanted it over, even though few thought it would do any good. Boris Johnson offered relief from the trauma, the opportunity to end it all.

Depression’s power is immense. It brings with it a desperate yearning for sleep, for peace, for finality. As Edward Thomas, one of the most depressed poets England has ever produced, put it: “There is not any book, or face of dearest look, that I would not turn from now, to go into the unknown.” So in our depressive state, unable to summon the energy to fight any more, we allowed the end to come.

Stage six: testing. We asked ourselves: might it be ok? Might it be alright in Northern Ireland? It’s just a little more paperwork. Can the Union with Scotland hold? Will this new government adopt a liberal immigration policy, and an active industrial strategy to alleviate the damage of our departure? Will the new Conservative seats in the North give the party impetus to govern differently? Would it be better for all of us if we found a way to get along? Were we ready to forgive?

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Stage seven: acceptance. To end the grieving process, acceptance has to be unconditional. It isn’t whether Brexit is better, or worse, or better than it could have been. It simply is. An unchangeable, immutable fact.

The prayer used at Alcoholics Anonymous is well known: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Well, I have lived in politics for nearly twenty years. Politics is about training yourself to file almost everything in the “things I can change” box. It’s about never settling for a world less perfect than you can imagine. So accepting this loss is hard. It goes against my soul. I loved my place as a European citizen. I loved the freedom. I loved the belonging. I loved the solidarity. All this is lost to me and to my friends, and my countrymen. But worst of all, this is a thing I cannot change.

Some people will laugh at this article. How could I possibly equate the process of leaving a multilateral organisation as equivalent to losing a loved one? Laugh away, if you like. When I spoke about my sadness a couple of years ago, on Newsnight, the Express wrote that I had “sparked anger” by doing so. Someone emailed to tell me that my “liberal tears” tasted sweet.

I know it is not easy to be gracious in victory. You have put your all into fighting, and you deserve a moment of glory, and celebration. But the others fought too. Their tears are not sweet. They are as bitter as yours would have been. Don’t demand grace from the losers, the ones with nothing to show for all their work, ambition and hope. Their hands are empty; yours are full. So show compassion.

To all those who raise a glass as Britain leaves the European Union: you have your Brexit. Leave us our grief. It’s the least you can do.