Grieve Leave Community Blog: The Therapeutic Power of Satanic Metal

by Author & Grieve Leave Community Member, Becky Robison

On a Monday night in September 2023, I found myself in the nosebleeds at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, California, seated with a friend I’d only ever met online. I’d put special care into my outfit: a lavender corset-style top and pleather leggings, an attempt to cross pastel goth with 80s hair metal. On my pink KN-95 mask, I Sharpied the logo of the evening’s entertainment: GHOST.

Yes, Ghost—the Swedish Satanic metal band. I’d flown across the country specifically to attend the first of their two nights in L.A. When I booked the ticket, I assumed I’d be attending a regular concert. I had no idea there would be cameras rolling—that I’d be one of a few thousand fans to witness what would later become their concert film Rite Here Rite Now.

But that’s not the weird part: I only became a Ghost fan in the first place because my dad got sick and died. 

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Dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer shortly after I moved from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. No cancer is good cancer, but pancreatic cancer is brutal. Dad refused to hear his prognosis, convinced he could beat it out of spite, but my sister and I knew he had a year at most. 

He started treatment—an intense regimen of chemotherapy—and I started driving back north every few weeks to help care for him. I didn’t want my sister to carry the burden alone just because I’d moved to Kentucky on a pandemic-crazed whim. Dad had spent much of what should have been his retirement caring for our mom, who died of liver disease in 2020. It was time for his daughters to return the grim favor. 

Instead of decorating my new home, I was learning to administer blood thinner injections in my dad’s stomach. Instead of planting my new yard, I was trying to convince him to eat something more substantial than a pudding cup. As grateful as I was to be able to work remotely while helping him, doing my full-time job while caregiving did little to reduce stress. 

I needed an escape—or at the very least, I needed something to listen to during the long hours I spent driving I-65, back and forth between my new life and my father’s creeping death. 

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Ghost was founded in Linköping, Sweden in 2006 by a musician named Tobias Forge—but I’m reluctant to tell you more than that and ruin the fun. I prefer to believe Ghost is literally a series of Satanic popes backed by a band of nameless ghouls who haunt stages worldwide. 

Shortly before my dad’s diagnosis, Ghost released their fifth album, Impera—an arena rock masterpiece. I don’t know exactly how I found them—maybe Spotify put one of their songs on my Discover Weekly playlist, or maybe I heard their single “Mary on a Cross” when it went viral on TikTok. Either way, I fell from the pinnacle to the pit of Ghost’s catalog while learning to pronounce FOLFIRINOX and researching the Whipple procedure to treat pancreatic tumors.

My sudden Ghost devotion reminded me of my teenage years, when the bands I loved most carved out spaces inside my heart, drums thumping in the ventricles. Now in my 30s, scar tissue makes my heart harder to slice. But for whatever reason, Ghost’s music was sharp enough. Teenagers feel out of control—they’re expected to think and act like little adults, but they’re not allowed to make many choices for themselves. As a 35-year-old with a dead mom and a dying dad, I’d never felt more out of control. Perhaps that’s why I so gleefully flung myself into the open arms of frontman Papa Emeritus IV.

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Dad wasn’t ready to die, to put it mildly. Even after he stopped eating and drinking, he raged. Even after he lost control of his bodily functions, he raged. No amount of painkillers could soothe his bitterness. His heart kept furiously beating long after his consciousness slipped away. For nearly two weeks, my sister and I took shifts sleeping in the recliner next to his hospital bed, hoping our presence had some kind of ameliorating effect, until his violent protest against mortality finally met its inevitable defeat. Despite our vigil, he died without witnesses—my sister was asleep, and I was at home watching the family dogs.

Did I come to love Ghost because their skeletal appearance and graveyard lyrics helped me grieve my father’s death? It makes sense—Papa Emeritus IV and his nameless ghouls providing a sort of exposure therapy, a musical corpse meditation. While I’m sure that’s partially true, I have a different explanation: I came to love Ghost because they present a sexy, joyful form of death. A death with agency, with a pledge to the Devil and moonlight dancing. A death that isn’t a death—it’s a rock show. And rock never dies.

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I was supposed to see Ghost in Chicago. I’d purchased a ticket before Dad died, figured I’d have to drive up there anyway. A few days before the show, I caught COVID-19. I couldn’t attend the concert I’d been looking forward to for months, couldn’t see the band whose music had sustained me through one of the worst years of my life. 

I didn’t cry at my dad’s memorial service, but I did cry about missing that concert. 

When a Twitter friend suggested I come to Los Angeles to see Ghost there with her, I assumed it would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention kind of insane. But then I found a $100 round-trip flight. My credit card points covered the hotel. My manager told me to go have fun. 

Hail Satan. 

The concert was phantasmagoric. Aside from Ghost’s usual stage antics—masked ghouls competing for the spotlight, a swinging censer of incense, dozens of papal costume changes—there was also a veiled opera singer, a haunting string quartet, and a troupe of choreographed dancing skeletons. My new friend and I nearly toppled over the steep ledge of our section, screaming the lyrics, reaching for our beloved Papa below. Be still my beating heart! 

But not forever, not for now. 

Becky Robison (she/her) is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the mind behind My Parents Are Dead: What Now? — a project that aims to help people navigate the dizzying labyrinth of post-death bureaucracy based on her own experience. Her book My Parents Are Dead: What Now? A Practical Guide to Your Life After Their Death is forthcoming from Quirk Books next year. In the meantime, you can sign up to read The Columbarium, her free weekly newsletter.