Nick Cave has sent a thank-you note to his fans in the wake of his son’s death.
Jethro Lazenby died aged 31 earlier this month, with Cave issuing in a statement to NME: “We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.”
A fan has now written to Cave, as featured on the artist’s The Red Hand Files blog, saying that they were sending “collective love” on behalf of all his fans amid the recent tragedy.
“I have no question for you today,” Teresa from Australia wrote. “I just wanted to send my heartfelt condolences on the tragic loss of Jethro. All I can do is offer the collective love of all who read your letters. Much love to you and all your family.”
Cave responded: “Dear Teresa. Thank you for your letter. Many others have written to me about Jethro, sending condolences and kind words. These letters are a great source of comfort and I’d like to thank all of you for your support.”
He concluded the response to say that he would return to writing on his blog in a few weeks’ time.
Cave lost another son, Arthur, 15, in 2015 after he fell to his death from a cliff in Brighton.
Jethro was born in Melbourne in 1991 and only learned that Cave was his father when he was eight years old. He became a model after being scouted while in the city, but also tried his hand at acting, with roles in 2007’s Corroboree and 2011’s My Little Princess. He also worked more recently as a photographer.
Following the news of Jethro’s passing, Nick’s wife Susie shared a picture of Jethro on Instagram with the caption “Darling Jethro”.
Cave has previously spoken about how he coped with loss in the years following his son Arthur’s death. In a December 2019 edition of The Red Hand Files, the Bad Seeds musician responded to two fans who both contacted the singer after recently suffering the loss of a child.
“Susie [Cave’s wife] and I have learned much about the nature of grief over recent years. We have come to see that grief is not something you pass through, as there is no other side,” he wrote in 2020.
He continued: “For us, grief became a way of life, an approach to living, where we learned to yield to the uncertainty of the world, whilst maintaining a stance of defiance to its indifference. We surrendered to something over which we had no control, but which we refused to take lying down.
“Grief became both an act of submission and of resistance — a place of acute vulnerability where, over time, we developed a heightened sense of the brittleness of existence. Eventually, this awareness of life’s fragility led us back to the world, transformed.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Dominik, director of the new film This Much I Know To Be True, has spoken to NME about how the movie depicts how far Cave has come in his journey of processing grief.
This Much I Know To Be True, which was in cinemas for one night only on May 11, is a documentary-meets-performance film that centres on the creative relationship between Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, and looks at the creation of their most recent albums ‘Ghosteen‘ and ‘CARNAGE‘.
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