The ways we find each other through grief
Grief is often spoken about as though it begins with death. In reality, it can arrive much earlier, entering the room with a diagnosis and settling into everyday life while the person you love is still alive. For James Forbes, vocalist of San Diego melodic metal band Once Loved, that suspended period began when his father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2022. Forbes was in California while his father was in Manila, ten thousand miles across the Pacific. There was no intervention capable of closing that distance or changing what was coming. The ordinary instinct to help had nowhere to go.
Forbes turned to surfing, heading into the water almost daily while cancer weighed on his family. Escape is sometimes treated as a failure to confront reality, but anyone living through prolonged fear knows it can also be a form of survival. The concentration required by the sea briefly narrowed the world to the next wave. Yet it was during one of these sessions that the idea behind “Common Traits” emerged. Forbes imagined crossing the ocean to reach his father, even as he understood that no feat of will could save him. The image captures one of grief’s cruellest contradictions: the mind keeps searching for an action long after action has become impossible.
Once Loved also began during this period. Forbes placed an advertisement on Craigslist looking for people with whom he could start a band, and guitarist Mike Malleske responded. Bassist Daniel Cohen entered the picture through another mundane online encounter, after buying an amplifier from Forbes on Facebook Marketplace, while drummer Tyler Olson completed the group through a mutual connection. There is something revealing in this accidental route towards companionship. Adult friendship is frequently presented as something that should happen naturally, yet it is often assembled through practical exchanges, shared interests and the decision to answer a stranger. At a time when Forbes could do little for his father, making something with other people offered a different kind of agency.
“Common Traits” was the first song Forbes and Malleske wrote together, in Malleske’s San Diego apartment. They later set it aside, choosing to pursue other material, before returning to it in 2025. That delay matters. Some experiences cannot be understood on demand, and creative work does not always arrive as a clean act of catharsis. A song can remain unfinished because the life inside it is unfinished too. When the band revisited the piece, its structure changed, but the subject remained. Its melodic metal intensity carries not a triumphant escape from loss, but the recognition that pain may have to be accommodated rather than defeated.
The title refers to the experiences human beings eventually share, including the death of a parent. Calling this part of the natural order may be factually comforting, but knowledge offers limited protection when the loss is your own. Once Loved resist turning that truth into an easy moral. Instead, “Common Traits” occupies the space between acceptance and protest, between knowing what must happen and still wishing the sea could be crossed. The band’s formation tells a parallel story: while one relationship was moving towards its end, several others were beginning through adverts, transactions and chance. Grief did not produce a neat lesson or erase the past. It created an absence, and around that absence, four people found one another.