“I Can Never Say Goodbye” by The Cure

The album cover for “Songs of a Lost World.”

Fans of The Cure from the ‘80s and ‘90s will not be disappointed with their latest endeavor – an aching, melancholic album of eight tunes titled “Songs of a Lost World.” Frontman and songwriter Robert Smith wanders the valleys of aging with lines like “I’m outside in the dark / Wondering how I got so old” (in the final track, “Endsong”).

But it may be “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” an ode to Smith’s older brother Richard, that strikes closest to the heart of our fragility and mortality. “I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” Smith told British journalist Matt Everitt. “It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

“I Can Never Say Goodbye” opens with a hauntingly repetitive melody, before moving into lyrics that express the rawness of sitting with a loved one who’s dying:

Shadows growing closer now
There is nowhere left to hide
And I can’t break this dreamless sleep
However hard I try
I’m down on my knees
And empty inside

Smith goes on to express the feeling of hopeless cruelty that often accompanies such grief and loss of control:

Something wicked this way comes
From out the cruel and treacherous night
Something wicked this way comes
To steal away my brother’s life
Something wicked this way comes
I can never say goodbye

Anyone who has had to say goodbye to a loved one of their own may also find solace in this touching tribute.You can watch The Cure perform “I Can Never Say Goodbye” in the video below.