By David Fireman, LCSW

I have been thinking a lot about the Canadian rock band Rush—not only for their musical brilliance or the warmth and complexity of their sound, but also for their connection to grief and their ability to keep creating through devastation.

As a grief counselor, I spend a great deal of time with people whose lives have been severed in two: before and after. Before the death, illness, divorce, accident, or other unimaginable loss, life held a sense of normalcy, continuity, and predictability. Now, many long to return to that earlier world. They want to reclaim the life loss shattered and recover the selves they once were. In essence, they want to restore what Colin Murray Parkes called the “assumptive world”—the network of beliefs, expectations, and hopes that once made life feel coherent. The BEFORE.

It is entirely understandable. Loss shakes us at our foundations. It erases an entire reality and forces us to re-map a new one even while the ground shifts and liquifies beneath us. In that way, loss is not just sad, but cognitively violent. It scrambles our lives and requires that we walk a new path through intense struggle and confusion. Therein lies the AFTER!

One of grief’s cruelties is that there is usually no going back. In fact, the people who emerge from loss are not the same people anymore. They are different people from those who entered its terrain.

When Rush’s drummer, Neil Peart lost his daughter, Selena, and then his wife, Jacqueline, within a year of each other, the band stopped. These losses led him to step away from Rush for several years. During this time, he travelled alone by motorcycle across North America and chronicled his adventures in his memoir, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road. The book is powerful because it does not offer simple solutions, but it shows grief as a long winding road. It must have been so complicated for the band. While Neil descended into his grief and its upheaval, Alex and Geddy still felt there was a lot of fuel left in the band’s creative tank. But what else could they do? Some losses just do not fit neatly into a calendar. It must have dawned on them then that grief is completely indifferent to individual ambitions, let alone touring plans and recording contracts. So, for years, Rush disappeared from the stage.

Then they returned. What I admired most was that they did not “rush” it. They resisted turning their comeback into an inspirational story about overcoming adversity or “getting back to normal.” In fact, there was no normal to return to, and the band that came back was not the same band that had stopped. Peart, of course, was not the same person either. How could he be? His life had been shattered. Still, he found a way to play again, and Rush found a way back to their music. Peart also met Carrie whom he married after several years. Together, they welcomed a daughter Olivia. Again, this was not something he rushed into. In fact, his return to life and eventually to Rush, was not about replacing what he had lost. I think it was more about discovering that grief and love can exist side by side. That perspective shows up in many of his writings and lyrics, where gratitude and loss are braided together rather than treated as opposites.

As I reflect on their story, I keep returning to an idea from Sabina Spielrein, one of the great yet regrettably overlooked psychoanalytic thinkers of the Freud and Jung era. She proposed something both unsettling and profound: destruction can give rise to new being. At first, the idea sounds contradictory, even paradoxical. But the more time I spend with grieving people, the truer it seems. Sometimes something must die for something else to emerge—not because destruction is good, and certainly not because loss was meant to happen, but because life keeps flowing through the very places that have been destroyed. No one would choose devastation, yet something new can still come into existence. That is what I see in Rush. Their later years did not feel like a return to the past. Instead, they felt like the emergence of something new, shaped in the furnace of loss itself.

But Peart’s losses did not stop with the deaths of his wife and daughter. In 2018 he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, although he and his family chose to keep the diagnosis private. Despite extensive treatment he died in 2020. Geddy and Alex respected his decision to keep his personal life out of the public eye and refrained from speaking about it until after his death.

Now, years after Peart’s battle and eventual death, Rush is in yet another chaotic and new reality. How do you keep going when one of the most important people in your story has vanished? For a lot of fans, the answer is simple: you just do not. There is no way to replace Neil Peart, one of the greatest rock drummers to ever get behind a kit. But life rarely asks simple questions. And life often demands profound adaptations.

I worked with a client I will name John who played in a folk-rock duo with his best friend. He spoke poignantly about their joyful collaborations and challenging performances. They played mostly covers, with a few original songs mixed in. Between weekly rehearsals and live gigs, they spent a great deal of time together. They even assembled a song list and some rough but genuine marketing materials for local venues.

What struck me most was the intimacy of their bond: the inside jokes, the nicknames, the banter. Over the years, they had come to know each other’s families, interests, personal struggles, worldviews, loves, and fears. John later told me that his friend had developed brain cancer—a glioblastoma he described as the size of “a lemon.” On better days, they joked about the lemon in his head, though the humor only underscored the grim reality they were facing. Despite multiple heroic efforts to save him, including experimental trials on brand new treatment drugs, my client’s friend and musical partner died.

One day, he arrived at session carrying a guitar case. Inside was his friend’s guitar. His widow had shipped to him. He did not know she had done that. He said it took his breath away when he opened the case. As he showed it to me, he said, “playing it immediately brings me back to my partner’s pure joy with this instrument. He really loved playing this thing.” I remember the intensity of his grief and the many stories he shared then.

One story was about a coffee shop where they used to play beside the Metra tracks. “Needless to say,” he told me, “The damn train would come barreling through and disrupted half the set. That is how I remember it anyway. But the main thing is, I can still see him loving every minute of the performance. He loved playing music with me. As I did with him.”

John is reluctantly adjusting to his loss. He has not tried to find a new music partner. At this phase of his mourning process, he says he is not ready. “Maybe some time down the line.”

Each time John picks up his guitar, he feels connected to his friend. Playing has become a way of staying in touch with him. The instrument is a beautiful object, but its music can also serve as a portal, helping John feel close to his friend again. In that sense, our relationship with the dead may take the form of an ongoing dialogue. Contemporary grief theory suggests that mourning is less about detaching from the deceased and more about finding nonphysical ways to maintain the attachment.

That said, while grief is universal, each person experiences it in a deep personal way. I do not judge how anyone grieves; I try, as best I can, to bear witness to the process.

What strikes me about Rush’s story is Geddy Lee’s and Alex Lifeson’s willingness to keep exploring their music with a new drummer, Anika Nilles. I do not mean “replace” Peart—no one could replace him even if they tried. That is not what this new tour represents. Nilles is not trying to fill his shoes; she is bringing her own voice and style to music he helped create. For her and for Rush, the point is not to recreate the past, but to let something new emerge. Honestly, that may be one of the hardest tasks grief asks of us.

We often assume loyalty to the dead means preserving everything exactly as it was. We fear that change somehow betrays or diminishes what came before. It’s a difficult idea I keep circling back to: we sometimes cling to our suffering long after it exhausts us. Grief becomes a form of devotion. And to stop hurting can feel dangerously close to becoming indifferent. I have heard versions of these fears countless times.

Yet I do not believe healing requires amnesia. We cannot simply discard our attachments, identities, stories, and fears like worn-out machinery. We are not built that way. Instead, we carry our dead and our wounds forward, though in forms redefined by experience. I believe we must learn to hold both truths at once.

Rush’s recent evolution feels like a powerful example of what it means to live forward. Fans may be both disoriented and dazzled by Nilles’ playing as they adjust to this new version of the band, but Neil Peart’s absence remains as a powerful presence. The loss is real, yet it no longer fills every corner of a picture fixed and frozen in time. As their album title Moving Pictures suggests, the pictures move—and so does content they contain.

We often misunderstand what it means to move forward. We imagine it is a kind of turning our backs on seriousness, and instead falling into some superficial return to what is/was normal BEFORE. But genuine healing is not shallow at all. The price tag is enormous. We do not become unwounded. Something more like life moving forward in ways that face AFTER, head on. We cannot undo the devastation. Spielrein maintained a new form of being emerges through cataclysm. The previous version could not continue. Neither anticipated, nor desired, destruction demands that life continues.

So, when I look at and listen to Rush now, I do not see a band trying to recapture its glory days. I see two guys who have endured unimaginable losses, and who are still willing to step onto the stage, not forgetting the past, but incorporating it. I do not see this as a betrayal, but as an adaptation, a celebration. Their loss is still raw and real; you can see that in their meaningful tributes to Peart. Nonetheless, they are still willing to create something new together, and with a different drummer no less. And in a world that all too often worships certainty and permanence, there is something deeply moving to me about that.

I do not think Peart saw creativity as a triumph. Instead, he portrayed it as a force that can survive the destruction. On the album Grace Under Pressure in a song called Afterimage, he wrote the following lyrics in the aftermath of the sudden death of a friend, Robbie. The song grapples with an experience many grievers can relate to: a person who was there one day simply vanishes the next, yet their presence remains in memory and through their influences:

“Suddenly, you were gone from all the lives you left your mark upon.”

“I feel the way you would…”

That theme is close to what the bereavement literature calls “continuing bonds.” The notion is that we do not simply “move on” from the people we lose. On the contrary, we “move with” them, often persisting in the ways they would think and see the world.

Peart avoided sentimentality and focused instead on what remains after loss—and on what can still emerge from it. For him, creativity was not an escape from grief but a way to stay in conversation with what it left behind. His later life is a striking example of something many bereaved people struggle to believe: that rebuilding a meaningful life does not demand leaving the old one behind entirely. He carried the memory of his first family with him while allowing himself to love again and become a father again. For him, those two realities were not in competition with each other.

I see a compelling arc in all of this. Peart’s creative powers comingled and pushed through the suffering of his many losses and devastations. Years later, Rush’s band members and music continue to evolve after his death. The conversation keeps going. Better said, the music plays on. AFTER.