It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain died, and his only child — daughter Frances Bean Cobain — took to Instagram on Friday (April 5) to honor her dad and her journey with grief over the course of her life.
“His mom Wendy would often press my hands to her cheeks & say, with a lulling sadness, ‘you have his hands,’” Frances wrote alongside a series of photos of herself as a child with the Nirvana frontman, as well as baby photos of Kurt. “She would breathe them in as if it were her only chance to hold him just a little bit closer, frozen in time. I hope she’s holding his hands wherever they are. In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing. The biggest lesson learned through grieving for almost as long as I’ve been conscious, is that it serves a purpose. The duality of life & death, pain & joy, yin & yang, need to exist along side each other or none of this would have any meaning. It is the impermanent nature of human existence which throws us into the depths of our most authentic lives. As It turns out, there is no greater motivation for leaning into loving awareness than knowing everything ends.”
Frances was nearly two years old when her father died, so she never had the chance to develop a relationship with him, a notion she highlighted in her social media message. “I wish I could’ve known my Dad. I wish I knew the cadence of his voice, how he liked his coffee or the way it felt to be tucked in after a bedtime story,” she wrote. “I always wondered if he would’ve caught tadpoles with me during the muggy Washington summers, or if he smelled of Camel Lights & strawberry nesquik (his favorites, I’ve been told).”
She concluded her post by recalling a letter that Kurt wrote to her before she was born that read, “Wherever you go or Wherever I go, I will always be with you,” which she says still rings true. “Whether it’s by hearing a song or through the hands we share, in those moments I get to spend a little time with my dad & he feels transcendent,” Frances wrote.
See her full message here.
The grunge icon was discovered in a room above the garage of his Seattle home on Apr. 8, 1994, though investigators later determined that the 27 year-old rock star had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound three days earlier.