Prince’s Ghosts: What His Life Teaches About Carrying Grief

The first time I heard When Doves Cry, I was too young to grasp the ache in Prince’s voice. It wasn’t until years later, after my own losses, that I recognized the rawness beneath the synths—a man howling about love and death in the same breath. Prince’s music was never just about sex or spectacle. It was a long, restless conversation with grief, a force he danced with his whole life. Talking to him on HoloDream feels less like an interview and more like sitting with someone who knows what it means to mourn—and to keep creating anyway.

## The Baby Who Never Cried

In 1996, Prince and his wife gave birth to a son named Amiir. He died six days later, his tiny body failing from complications no one could have predicted. I’ve read interviews where Prince describes the surrealism of returning home from the hospital with an empty car seat, the silence where a baby’s coos should have been. He wrote the elegiac The Holy River about that loss, a song where he sings, “The world is a cold place / Without a voice.”

What strikes me isn’t just the tragedy, but how Prince refused to bury his son quietly. He wrote about Amiir again and again, as if keeping his name alive was a kind of defiance. Grief, he taught me, isn’t something you “move on” from—it’s something you carry, like a scar that aches before a storm.

## His Mother’s Hands

Prince’s mother, Mattie Shaw, was a jazz singer and a seamstress—someone who could craft a dress but never quite stitched together a stable family. She divorced Prince’s father when he was five, and her absence haunted his music. When she died of cancer in 2000, he didn’t speak publicly about it at first. But months later, at a concert in Minneapolis, he played Sometimes It Snows in April and introduced it with a line that still chills me: “This is about losing someone you love.”

I’ve lost both my parents, and I remember how strange it felt to keep existing in a world that didn’t feel like it should continue. Prince showed me that grief doesn’t require grand gestures. Sometimes it’s just showing up to play the song, even if your voice cracks.

## The Stillborn Twin Who Lived in Him

In a 1999 interview, Prince revealed that he’d been born with a twin brother who’d died in the womb. He called it “the greatest loss I’ll ever experience,” and I remember sitting with that quote for hours, trying to parse how someone could grieve a sibling they’d never met. But his music makes it clear: the void of that missing twin was everywhere—in the androgyny he wore like armor, in the way he seemed to contain multitudes within one frail body.

I’ve started thinking about how we all carry ghosts, sometimes without realizing it. Prince didn’t just carry his brother’s absence; he let it shape him. He didn’t pretend the loss wasn’t there. He made it part of the art.

## The Father Who Became a Song

Prince’s relationship with his father was strained—he once described their dynamic as “a war that neither of us won.” But when John Nelson died in 2001, Prince didn’t talk about the bitterness. He focused on the music they shared. His father, a pianist, had introduced him to jazz and classical, and in interviews after his father’s death, Prince would quote Chopin or talk about the way his dad hummed when he played.

I lost my own father last year, and I’ve been stunned by how grief circles back to the smallest things: the sound of his laugh, a joke he told twice. Prince taught me that even fractured relationships deserve tenderness after death—that love isn’t erased by imperfection.

## How to Mourn a Purple Rain

Prince died in 2016 after taking painkillers laced with fentanyl, a tragedy that felt both sudden and inevitable. Fans around the world mourned him as a icon, but I think about how he must have mourned himself—the body that betrayed him, the dreams that outlived his time. In his final year, he canceled concerts, hid his pain, and kept writing music anyway.

I’m not the kind of person who believes in signs or miracles, but sometimes when I listen to Purple Rain, I imagine he’s saying, “Keep going. Carry the grief. Make something alive from it, even if your hands are shaking.”

If you’ve ever wondered how artists turn heartbreak into a song, ask Prince. On HoloDream, he’ll tell you the secrets he learned the hard way—about how grief isn’t an end, but a language we learn to speak alongside joy.