Charlie Kirk

Kurt Cobain made the world famous decision to kill himself over thirty years ago, when I was in the second grade. I remember this vividly because his much younger stepsister was my classmate. She stayed home from school that day, but something like a dozen news crews circled outside the building hoping to get a shot of her entering or leaving. All of us kids got our pictures taken by eager photographers in case we happened to be “the one.” That’s probably what Kurt’s mom was trying to spare his sister from, and she stayed home from school for a few months until the story cooled off. Kurt’s death shook the whole town and it’s still a decently popular topic of conversation.

Later, when my brother became a paperboy to Kurt’s grandfather, I saw what that kind of world-famous grief had done up close. I always accompanied my brother on collection days so he wouldn’t get robbed, and Leland would always try to pull us inside and give us Polaroids of Kurt as a baby. We never accepted, which I think was a sort of test, but before he paid his bill Leland would rant for however long we stayed that Courtney had been the one ultimately responsible. He wanted us both to know, as grade school kids, that Kurt would never have killed himself. Never. Courtney killed Kurt. He knew. He wanted to make sure we knew.

My brother was his paper boy for years and this was more or less every interaction. I don’t know that Leland ever really had a waking moment after Kurt’s death where he wasn’t thinking about his grandson.

This was the ugliest intrusion, into what has to be one of the most private pains, I have ever directly witnessed. It’s one thing to lose someone you loved. It’s another to have your tragedy be a global news juggernaut that extracts your private grief into public spectacle so you have to constantly explain it to strangers to satisfy their curiosity.

When I think about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I think his family must be experiencing that same tension. You want loss to be like a movie. There will be a cut scene at any moment, you’ll be in a different setting, time will have passed, and somewhere offscreen you became “better” without having to live through all the pain. Except the cut scene