A Complicated Grief: Moby Opens up About Parents’ Deaths

Credit: Blisspop

The Guardian recently spoke with American musician Moby, who revealed what it was like to grow up poor with a single, absent mother in an otherwise ritzy Connecticut town. The artist elaborates on the effects of his parents’ death on his stages of grief, as well as the construction of his own family values. Moby had an atypical relationship with his mother, and none whatsoever with his father – thus, his reflections on their passing, and on death and the regrets of the dying in general, become rather unique.

Credit: moby.com

“I know this sounds like a Kris Kristofferson lyric,” he begins, “but it’s hard to miss something you’ve never known.” The artist is referring to his father’s death, which occurred at the hand of a drunk-driver when Moby was just two. Yet he says he never felt the need to fill this hole in his family life. “Everyone else I knew,” he said “had two parents and I didn’t…[but] I didn’t think it was particularly tragic or strange.”

However, the lack of a father figure in Moby’s life didn’t mean his mother became doubly present; she constantly encouraged her son to be creative and follow his own path – and she did her best to raise a child with modest financial means. Nevertheless, Moby says his mother was the epitome of the freewheeling, pot-smoking parent who was always more of a “really close friend” than a mom. When she died, he says, it felt like the loss of confidante, not a mother.

A baby “Moby” with parents.
(Credit: moby.com)

“When someone dies,” he says, you ask yourself, “What can I learn from both their successes and their failures? What did they do that I want to emulate and what didn’t they do that I’d like to learn from?””

He told The Guardian that he learned a lot from his mother’s death and the fears she had approaching it. It was a sense of fear, he says, that overshadowed her entire life – and probably something that influences the regrets of the dying in many other instances as well. “I try to be aware of the role of fear in my life,” says Moby, “and how much of an inhibitory influence it’s having on me.”

Read the entire interview with The Guardian here.

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• A “No-Fear” Death: SevenPonds’ article on teminally ill doctor Stephen Wealthall’s philosophy on Death and easing end of life regrets.
• Politicians, Actors, Musicians: SevenPonds reflects on the losses of 10 influential, public figures in the year 2013.
• Read about the newest generation’s penchant for “Funeral Selfies,” and how it speaks to the relationship between social norms and today’s rapid, pervasive technology.