There are albums you listen to casually, and then there are albums that arrive when your heart is torn open. The Soul Cages became that for me. I had heard Sting’s work before, but it wasn’t until after my father died that this album felt like it had been quietly waiting for me. Suddenly it wasn’t just art anymore — it was a reflection of everything I was wrestling with: grief, identity, the tension between inherited faith and personal belief, and the complicated weight of a father–son relationship.
A Quiet Religion, A Quiet Distance
Religion was never something my father enforced. It wasn’t preached or demanded. It was just there.
We were Christians. Not spoken aloud, just expected.
But as I grew older, that inherited faith stopped fitting as neatly. Not in an angry, rebellious way — simply a drifting, a quiet mismatch between what I was told we were and what I actually felt. It created a faint friction — a distance. Conversations we lacked the vocabulary for, left unspoken.
It never came naturally to me. Eventually I realised it had never come at all — that what I called belief was simply me acting the part.
My relationship with my father was much the same: loving, present, but with long, unspoken stretches. He was a part of my life in a way that felt foundational but also unreachable — like a landscape I could always see but never fully map.
My father was a man of severe moral convictions, the kind that didn’t bend with circumstance. But he never imposed that code on anyone else — he held only himself to its full weight.
He grew up under the Japanese occupation, and while my family’s hometown was too small for the soldiers to bother with, the self‑sufficiency and iron‑will he forged in those lean years stayed with him for life. His honour was everything to him. He loved old westerns and wuxia shows because their worlds made sense to him — right was right, wrong was wrong, and a man stood by his word. He seemed almost mythical, like an archetype from a bygone era. That clarity shaped him, but it also cost him. He had a great career, yet we weren’t left with much in the end, in part because of that same honour and a stubborn pride he wouldn’t — he couldn’t — set down.
The Myth That Became Personal
When I returned to The Soul Cages, I was struck by how much Sting’s myth‑making echoed what I couldn’t articulate. The imagery of harbours, deep water, storms, shipyards — a son diving into the dark to wrestle with grief and reclaim something of his father.
And in listening to it now, I realise I’m doing the same — trying to reclaim something of my father for myself, something more human than the idealised figure I carried for years.
And for me, one detail hit harder than I expected:
Billy longed to bury his father at sea.
I did. We committed my father’s ashes to the waters — as he had asked in his will — near his beloved hometown, far from the home he built for most of his life, and where I still live.
There is something disorienting about committal to the sea. No niche to visit, no urn. Just the horizon, the water, the currents. Grief becomes unmoored, and so do you.
That distant shoreline is not a casual return.
When Sting sang of Billy wishing he could cast his father into the ocean, it wasn’t the image that pierced me — it was the recognition. That strange, weightless moment when you realise you’re releasing the last physical evidence of him into something in constant change.
Faith, or the Space Where Faith Used To Live
My struggle wasn’t with imposed doctrine — my father never pushed religious weight onto me. It was more a lingering question: what do you do with a faith that was inherited as identity, not conviction? What happens when it no longer feels like your story, but still feels tied to your father’s?
The Soul Cages gave shape to that tension. It captured a spiritual exhaustion — not anger, not rejection, just a tired reaching that never resolves.
In Sting’s narrative, the son is wrestling not just with grief, but with the spiritual structures surrounding his father’s life and death. That resonated deeply with me. I wasn’t fighting religion; I was untangling myself from a framework I didn’t fully inhabit.
It was comforting, in a quiet way, to hear someone else wrestling with inherited belief, trying to reconcile love, loss, and identity without answers, only the slow work of acceptance.
A Language for What I Couldn’t Say
Grief after the funeral — after the sea takes the last physical trace — becomes a very internal thing. There’s no ritual to anchor the days. Just memory and silence. He specifically wanted a sea funeral because he hated any ceremony. With children, and the general chaos of life, I’ve forgotten the yearly Guinness a few times over the years. I think he would have been okay with that.
The Soul Cages became a map for that silence. I didn’t find closure in it, but I did find a language — a way to hold my father in my thoughts without drowning in the unresolved parts of our relationship.
The album reminded me that grief isn’t about resolving everything. It’s about learning to coexist with the things you couldn’t say, the questions you never asked, the parts of him that live in you whether you wanted them to or not.
Still Diving
Years later, I still return to The Soul Cages. Not out of sadness, but out of recognition. Out of respect for that time in my life when the sea took something from me, and music gave me something back.
I listen the way you check in on an old scar — no longer painful, almost comforting in its familiarity.
This album taught me that grief isn’t something you get over, but something you learn to live with.
I don’t know if I’ve freed anything from its “soul cage.” I just know I’ve learnt how to carry him, like the tides carry him.
