Why Can’t We Let Kurt Cobain Have His Death?

On Our Discomfort With Suicide

In 2014, headlines around the world announced that at long last, Seattle police had released the contents of a note found in Kurt Cobain’s wallet after his death. Coverage of the note was breathless. “Note From Kurt Cobain’s Wallet Scorning Courtney Love Released by Seattle Police” said Billboard. “The Kurt Cobain Suicide Note We've Been Waiting For,” said Esquire. The implications were clear. There’s more to the story of Cobain’s death than the public knows, and whatever is unknown has to do with the scheming of his widow, Courtney Love.

Days later, the press was forced to admit that the note was, in fact, written by Love herself. It’s also clearly a joke, reading in part: “Do you Kurt Cobain take Courtney Michelle Love to be your lawful shredded wife even when shes [sic] a bitch with zits and siphoning all yr money for doping and whoring.” It was a joke in line with the couple’s sense of humor and their mutual obsession with the grosser aspects of the human body. 

(Nirvana’s most bodily fluid filled song, and my personal favorite)

As the 30th anniversary of Cobain’s death on April 5, 1994 approaches, many remain convinced that Love killed her husband. This rumor persists even though neither the police nor anyone close to Cobain contest that it was a suicide. There is total agreement between his parents, sister, bandmates, extended family members, and close friends. Nor are the circumstances of his death that mysterious. His last movements are well known. The provenance of the shotgun and shells he used to end his life are not in question. 

Cobain’s death isn’t even the most mysterious among grunge royalty. Eight years to the day later, Alice In Chains lead singer Layne Stayley’s emaciated, decomposing body was discovered in his Seattle home. The scene was pure chaos. The room was strewn with spray paint bottles, drugs, and piles of cash. Stayley had become reclusive and the weeks before his death are largely unaccounted for. Drugs were found in his system, but the medical examiner couldn’t determine his cause of death. This has attracted little attention. 

What is it about Cobain’s death that continues to fuel conspiracy theories? Full-length documentaries, books, YouTube videos, true crime TikToks, endless forum posts, and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries posit that Cobain was murdered. This refusal to let Kurt Cobain have his death says far more about us than it does about Cobain or Love. It’s a testament to our willing ignorance about suicide risk and mental illness. If our society doesn’t like the answer to a painful question, we find an answer we like. Or we change the question.

THE CASE FOR SUICIDE

Much of the opacity around Cobain’s death comes from misconceptions and small unknowns. On the other hand, it’s hard to concisely sum up all the indications that Cobain died by suicide. The CDC lists 15 individual and relationship risk factors for suicide. Counting conservatively, Cobain checks off 11. If the same factor can be applied multiple times — such as counting “serious illness” three times to account for his chronic bronchitis, debilitating stomach pain, and worsening scoliosis — Cobain easily exceeds a score of 15. 

It would take a separate essay to lay out all the risk factors and their applicability to Cobain’s life. I’ll focus on only one, as it’s the strongest indicator of suicide risk: a history of previous attempts. A study of suicide attempt survivors found that 5.4% of people who attempt suicide eventually die that way. The first year is by the far the most deadly — among men in the study, 80% of those who completed suicide did so within a year of their initial attempt. Cobain attempted suicide by overdose on March 3 in Rome, just over a month before his death on April 5, 1994. 

(An upset Cobain sings “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on Valentine’s Day 1994.)

Conspiracy theorists have tried to claim this was just an accidental overdose. While I don’t believe this (he left a note) it wasn’t his only suicidal action that month. On March 18, Cobain locked himself in a room with multiple firearms and threatened suicide. Courtney Love called the police, which ended the standoff. According to the biography Heavier Than Heaven, around this time his friend Jennifer Adamson expressed her concern that he would die from an overdose. Cobain responded that he wasn’t going to die that way — he would shoot himself in the head. 

It’s impossible to fully understand anyone’s suicide. That the “reasons” are always inadequate is one of the primary agonies that haunt those left in its wake. Every memory becomes a question. What was I missing? What should I have done? A lovely day at the beach becomes a crime scene in the mind — was she trying to tell me something when she said there were clouds on the horizon and I couldn’t see any? The desire to understand “why” can curdle into resentment and hatred. Such is the case with Cobain. Some Nirvana fans can’t understand or accept why. Their response is blame. Their evidence is scant.

INSIDE THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the conspiracy theories. In a nutshell, they require Courtney Love to be so ruthlessly cunning that she orchestrated her husband’s death in Seattle from a Los Angeles hotel room. She did so without arousing a whiff of suspicion from the constant stream of friends, journalists, and medical personnel (she was attempting to detox at the hotel) who came and went that week. Love was never alone. Simultaneously, the conspiracy theories require Love to be so stupid that she didn’t just let her husband die from any of his self-administered overdoses.

There is supreme irony in blaming Love for killing her husband: No one did more to keep him alive. The Rome incident was one of at least a dozen times Love revived her husband from a near-fatal overdose. Cobain made numerous suicidal gestures during their relationship and Love defused them all. Heavier Than Heaven recounts that Cobain brought a gun into the hospital room where she was recuperating from giving birth. He demanded they commit double suicide. She coaxed him into putting the gun down with help from Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, who happened to be visiting. 

The Love-as-murderer theory was partially popularized by the 1998 BBC documentary Kurt & Courtney. I expected the documentary to be a typical true crime cheapie. Bad wigs, scary music stings, professorial “experts” with computer models and ballistics gel. Instead, Kurt & Courtney is excruciatingly dull. It’s amazing something this poorly made had a lasting cultural impact. Much of the film is boring footage of rundown Pacific Northwest towns followed by interviews with one intoxicated person after another, most of whom have a personal grudge against Love. 

One of them is a former drug buddy named Amy, who offers to produce pictures of Kurt and Courtney using heroin, implying that she’ll do so for the right price. The photos do not materialize. A producer tells Amy to drink more coffee as she’s clearly nodding off. It’s shameful journalism. Interviews like this are interspersed with footage of Love fighting with journalists. Director Nick Broomfield was clearly angry that Love wouldn’t let him license Nirvana’s music for the film, as he brings it up multiple times. Why Love would be inclined to license music for a film that calls her a murderer is unclear. 

At times, Broomfield overdubs scenes with leading questions. The worst example of this is during an interview with Dylan Carlson. Carlson was a lifelong friend of Cobain and one of the few people he hung out with in March and April of 1994. By then, Cobain had pushed most people away as his heroin addiction spiraled out of control. Carlson was also an addict and therefore not in a position to cast aspersions.

Carlson purchased the shotgun Cobain used to end his life. This was after the March 18 police call when (as a precaution against self-harm) all of Cobain’s firearms were confiscated. Cobain explicitly wanted a shotgun that wasn’t registered in his name. That way, it would be overlooked if the police returned. The filmmakers ignore that this shows incredible self-harm intent. Instead, Broomfield hammers Carlson for an answer — Why would you buy a gun for a friend who is suicidal? Broomfield both asks this to Carlson and overdubs it for effect. He wants Carlson to say Cobain wasn’t suicidal. But Carlson can only demur. He has no answers. There aren’t any. 

The lack of answers to impossible questions creates a vacuum that conspiracies try to fill. But it is only ever a void pinpricked by cold stars of speculation — Did Carlson know his friend was suicidal? Could he tell this time was different after years of witnessing Cobain’s self-destructive behavior? Was Cobain actually acting different, considering he’d felt suicidal off-and-on since age 13? Was Carlson able to see anything beyond the cloud of his own addiction? Anyone who’s been forced to construct a narrative in the wake of a loved one’s suicide knows this is a losing project.

The 2015 documentary Soaked In Bleach, which reignited interest in the conspiracy, was more like what I thought Kurt & Courtney would be. Love is portrayed by a woman in a bad blonde wig who writhes about in various beds looking sexy and evil. Soundbites from forensic experts are stitched together to sow doubts — all of whom were pissed when the movie came out, as none of them actually believed it was a murder. Featured homicide investigator Vernon J. Geberth wrote in a Facebook post, “I had made it quite clear that I believed that Kurt Cobain took his own life and backed up my opinion with the facts that I had obtained from the Seattle Police Department's Homicide Division coupled with my own experience with suicide cases.”

Soaked In Bleach mostly follows Tom Grant, a private detective Love hired to find Cobain after he escaped from rehab on March 31, 1994. Grant has made a career out of claiming Love was responsible for killing her husband. He’s made hundreds of media appearances, sells books, and runs a security consulting business from the domain cobaincase.com. Grant follows two people on Twitter —  a man who wrote a fanfiction novel about Cobain’s death and a pastor with an 11 hour video on why women should be banned from church leadership positions. That Grant has made a living by selling conspiracy theories about Kurt Cobain is not commented on by Soaked In Bleach. 

Cognitive dissonance is on full display in the film. It requires Courtney Love to be stupid enough to hire a private investigator knowing that he might dig up dirt implicating her, but smart enough to escape prosecution. It can’t even come up with a plausible alternate series of events. A montage of the days leading up to the rockstar’s death fades to black as faux-Cobain enters a taxi on the morning of April 2. The film neglects to mention where he was going — to buy shotgun shells. 

The conspiracy theories focus on small questions and inconsistencies, many of which are easily answered. How did the spent shotgun shell, which would’ve been ejected to Cobain’s right, end up to his left? It bounced off the linoleum floor. Why would Cobain have chosen to end his life in a greenhouse? His daughter’s nanny and the nanny’s girlfriend were in the main house. The fact they didn’t notice his absence was due to Cobain’s erratic comings and goings and their own drug use. Why were there no fingerprints on the gun? This is common once rigor mortis has set in (a more graphic description of why this occurs is easily findable, but I will spare you). Why was part of his suicide note written in big, messy letters while the rest is neat? He wrote most of the note in his bedroom, then added more while hunched over on the floor of the greenhouse. Writing on a linoleum floor is hard, so the writing was messier. He also left a longer, more explicit letter addressed to his wife, which has never been released to the public.

Conspiracy theorists fixate on the note found at the scene. “He never mentions suicide in the so-called suicide note,” stated journalist Ian Halperin by way of proof in a CBS interview. I debated whether to touch on this subject, as it’s journalistic best practice not to discuss the contents of a suicide note. But given that Cobain’s note is widely available online, I thought it was worth it to correct misguided beliefs about notes in general. The popular conception is that these are goodbye cruel world letters, wherein the suicide victim lays out their point-by-point reasoning. The truth is more complicated. Some notes are angry screeds. Others ramble and make little sense. Many people don’t leave a note at all. It’s also not uncommon for notes to contain only unemotional details, like how personal property should be disposed of. Researcher Dr. John Pestian described a note that reminded a loved one to get their tires changed. Poet Sylvia Plath left a two-line note asking someone to call her general practitioner. The many shapes and sizes of these notes are so great that mental health professionals can only accurately identify whether a note is real or fake only 49% of the time. 

Cobain’s level of heroin intoxication is the most cited proof for why it couldn’t be suicide. This alleges he had a fatal overdose’s amount of heroin in his system, which would’ve prevented him from operating a gun. Everything about Cobain’s death is sad, but this part always gets me. It feels like a relic from before the opiate crisis. The year after Cobain’s death, the FDA approved OxyContin and declared it “non-addictive” based on a single, limited study. Now 136 Americans die every day from opiates. People overdose in malls, in cars, in schools, in alleyways, in childhood bedrooms, in front of their children. It has become part of the background of American life, so prevalent that Sesame Street created a line of videos for kids with opiate-addicted parents. Unfortunately, more Americans now know that heroin isn’t like in the movies. Stupefying effects do not begin immediately, unless the drug is cut with other agents like fentanyl. Death typically occurs one to three hours after use. Cobain had time before losing consciousness.

In the CBS interview, Halperin’s coauthor Max Wallace contends that, “there is not a single case in U.S. history documented where someone was able to survive more than a few seconds after ingesting [the amount of heroin Cobain did.]” This is untrue. Overdose survivors have registered blood levels well above Cobain’s 1.52 mg/l. Toxicity levels are also hard to pin down, as there is no central reporting requirement and therefore no way to determine the average. Many jurisdictions determine overdose deaths without any sample analysis. 

Some find it suspicious that Cobain would intentionally overdose and also use a shotgun. The reasons for this are impossible to ascertain, but it may be clarifying to know that Cobain was the third person in his family to die by suicide using simultaneous methods. His great-uncle and great-grandfather died similarly.

AND NOW I AM WITHOUT MEDICINE

The idea for this essay didn’t begin with Kurt Cobain. It began because I couldn’t get a clip out of my mind. I can’t remember where I saw the documentary One Last Hug: Three Days At Grief Camp, or why or when. But a scene stuck with me. The film follows a handful of kids attending a camp for grieving children. Most have lost a parent. The kids gather in a circle to discuss their lost loved ones. A tween says her cancer-stricken father battled his disease relentlessly, despite the pain he was in, just so he could stick around in her life a little longer. Other kids echo this sentiment. Their parent loved them that much, too. A seven year-old girl storms off, scowling. Her dark hair is pulled back in a rumpled ponytail. She hasn’t participated with as much gusto as the others and now things have come to a head. The counselors seem perplexed and exasperated by the girl’s reaction. 

(Trailer for the documentary.)

I watched this scene with increasing alarm — the answer was obvious. The girl’s father had died by suicide. Other kids’ parents fought tooth-and-nail to stay with them. In the girl’s mind, her father had abandoned her. She wasn’t enough to make him stay. He didn’t love her. And if your father doesn’t love you, who ever will? I was stunned that trained grief counselors couldn’t see this. It’s one of the hardest parts of being a suicide loss survivor — you are alone even in your grief. 

People know how to react to deaths by illness or accident. Suicide retains an aura of shame and silence. Even the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention recommends suicide loss survivors not be interviewed for two years after their loved one’s death in the name of “empowerment,” as survivors’ stories could be too distressing. (This is not a sentiment shared by NAMI or The Trevor Project.) We still operate on the level we used to about domestic violence and sexual abuse — if we don’t talk about it, then it’s not there. By speaking its name we summon it. 

I always knew how my uncle died. He shot himself when my mother was 11. Still, he was present in our house. My mother kept an 8x10 of his senior photo — smiling in a blue-and-white flannel shirt — in an alcove above our staircase. This was also where she put our Nativity scene. So each Christmas he was above it, like the star that called the wise men.

I feel lucky that my mother never lied to me. She answered my questions with candor and never hid why my sister and I weren’t allowed to have nerf guns or video games — since so many involved shooting. It also comforted her, I think, to talk about him with me. I resemble him more than anyone else in my family. We have the same slightly upturned nose, the same curly brown hair, the same blue eyes. I wouldn’t appreciate for many years what a gift her honesty was. Many families bury their loss. In darkness grief multiplies. In silence the stigma of suicide grows.

My mother is a true Mainer — pragmatic, blunt, unable to suffer fools. She hated her brother’s actions but she’d come to terms with it. He’d taken what felt like the only available path to relieve his pain. Suffering from a severe form of bipolar disorder, his brain rebelled against him and made even simple tasks impossible. The sense of helplessness made him think people would be better off without him. This wasn’t true. My mother would spend decades assisting another mentally ill relative and still consider it nothing next to the loss of her brother. But it was a truth he couldn’t obtain. It wouldn’t take root in him.

Conspiracy theories around Cobain’s death thrive, in part, because our culture avoids a realistic understanding of suicide. It is confined to the realm of lunatics and losers. Pathetic souls that deserve to be scorned. Go to the edges of any Christian graveyard in America and you’ll see clusters of poorly maintained stones set back into the woods. This is where victims of suicide end up, forever separated from the rest of humanity.

Since Cobain is widely considered a genius and not a loser, this creates a dissonance that can be “solved” through the belief in conspiracies. If your understanding is that people who commit suicide are selfish losers condemned to eternal damnation, then of course you don’t want to that to be the fate of your rock hero. His death cuts against typical notions of suicide. He had “won” at life. He’d raked in millions of dollars, had legions of fans, and was dubbed the voice of a generation. In a society where fame and fortune are the de facto goals of all lives, evidence that this does not shield you from despair must be disregarded. It isn’t that people are stupid; it’s that people need to believe. It’s impossible to drop out of the late-capitalist hellscape, so embracing its rules can be a form of self protection.

OUTSIDE THE MARCO POLO HOTEL

I found a suicide note in Seattle. I lived in the Fremont neighborhood and every weekday left for work at sunrise. On the city’s rare clear days, I watched the marvel of dawn hitting the white slopes of Mount Rainier and bursting into flames of orange, red, and rapturous pinks. This was not one of those days. It was one of the more common days of drear. Swaddled in an already sodden raincoat, I headed toward a bus stop on the Aurora Bridge. The bridge spans a canal that flows between Lake Union and Lake Washington. Cobain died in a house near the shore of Lake Washington. Although I was a Nirvana obsessive and his home was only five miles away from my own, I never even went to the neighborhood. Too much of a violation. And anyway, he was no longer there. Not in any sense of the word.

My route to the bus stop was a circuitous series of pedestrian paths around the city’s many under- and overpasses. The Aurora Bridge arcs high over a couple blocks of the city, casting shade over houseboats, tech offices, a popular greenway, and a statue of spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy. It also has the second-highest suicide rate of any bridge in America. I didn’t know this at the time. Nor did I know that Kurt Cobain spent many of his last days at the rundown Marco Polo Hotel, which I passed by daily. He hid out there in the interim between his Rome overdose and his failed rehab attempt. 

(view from the Aurora Bridge, via Reddit)

I was atypically early leaving the house that morning. So, I had time to examine a sheet of paper laid on a hedge beneath a Route 99 overpass near the Aurora Bridge. I’m always curious about written ephemera on the street, stopping to look at what is usually a grocery list or religious tract. Not this time. The sheet was written in red ink. It did not read as a suicide note at first. I will leave out the specifics, but it started with a litany of marital gripes, like you might write to let off steam after a fight. Only as the letter progressed and the writing got cramped did the intent become clear. 

Seattle is full of dense hedges, hidden places where people can be easily concealed. I thought immediately of Kurt Cobain. In eighth grade, he discovered the hanged body of a friend’s older brother. It traumatized him and, by his own account, made him obsessed with suicide. One of his best known drawings is a hanged man wearing a football helmet. I was terrified to find a body.

The note was unsigned and ended mid-sentence. There was clearly another sheet somewhere. Despite my fear, I searched through the greenery but was unable to locate it. Who had left the note and why in shrubs beneath an overpass? There was a sleeping bag higher up where rain couldn’t reach. It was unoccupied now that the sun was up. I didn’t think the note had come from whomever camped there. But maybe. Beneath the bridge and soaked to the bone, I thought of “Something In The Way,” a song I always skip when it comes up on shuffle. Too painful.

(My favorite rendition of the song)

I called my boyfriend and had him take custody of the note — I was our only income earner and couldn’t miss work. After some debate, we decided to turn the note over to the police. The 911 operator gasped then sighed and said, “Oh geez.” I don’t know what they did with it. I’ll never know if the person who wrote it was only ideating, attempted suicide, or completed it. I still don’t like to use red ink. It makes me see the note’s letters — big blocks of unmistakable pain, the type that swallows people whole. The darkness of suicide is so overwhelming that it’s no wonder we don’t want to look at it. But the paper was real. It required a witness to find it, to hold it, to try to connect it with whomever could make the most sense of it. I was not special, but I could bear witness. 

THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

There is also danger in the Kurt hagiography — the preciously guarded belief that he was an insouciant angel who couldn’t withstand this evil world. Despite accepting Cobain’s suicide, this fuels misinformation about suicide and hatred against Love. Trawling through forum posts, I saw people slough off his negative traits and transpose responsibility onto his wife. It’s commonly believed that Love introduced him to heroin. In reality, he began using it before they met. This line of thinking risks romanticizing Cobain’s death. The awful reverse of rejecting his suicide is embracing it. If you identify with Cobain and believe he was too sensitive and beautiful for this world, then the conclusion might be that you, too, aren’t meant for this world and dying is the best way to get back at it.

Let me be clear that there’s nothing romantic about the last month of Cobain’s life. The talented man stayed in a near-constant heroin haze. His last meeting with bandmate Krist Novoselic started at the seedy Marco Polo Motel and ended in a tear-filled brawl at Sea-Tac. He spent his last night on earth sleeping in his clothes because the heating oil in his mansion had run out and he was either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Kierkegaard dubbed this terminal emotional state “the sickness unto death.” The Danish philosopher had felt the pain himself, explaining, “When death is the greatest danger, we hope for life, but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death.” 

Dying this way is an ugly dissolution. Like falling into endless gray mist. It’s far less poetic than life. Some people are drawn to suicide to punish a world that doesn’t appreciate them. This never works and no one’s suicide has ever served as a perfect revenge. Suicide does not condemn or redeem a life. It is the ultimate blankness. It isn’t fate but neither is it inescapable. 

Cobain infamously cited a Neil Young lyric in his suicide note. In the mid-70s Young, too, was at the end of his emotional rope. Strung out and disheveled, the Godfather of Grunge turned out some of the most nihilistic rock music of all time (don’t listen to Tonight’s The Night unless you’re in a good place). But Young recovered. Cobain may have known this on a subconscious level, as he quoted the lead single from Young’s 1978 comeback record. He would’ve also known that after this record Young said “fuck it” and spent most of the 80s at home with this family making experimental music and the wonderfully deranged film Human Highway. It’s devastating that in Cobain’s final darkness he was at least aware of someone who took another path. Nothing is inevitable. 

A LEONARD COHEN AFTERWORLD

My uncle reminded me of Kurt Cobain, or vice versa. Both grew up poor in logging towns. Both were talented artists, sensitive, moody. Both had young daughters. My uncle suffered from a variation of bipolar disorder that caused severe manic episodes. Treatment was nearly nonexistent in the mid-70s. The one medication option was thorazine, a tranquilizer that kept patients in a permanent twilight state. Bipolar people typically endured frequent hospitalizations that made holding a job impossible. There are no structures (then or now) that permit the flourishing of people who cannot live within the strict confines of “normal.” 

My uncle grew up in the black shadow of my grandfather — whose wild manias left him not only unable to work, but unable to recognize his own wife and children. He once locked them outside in the dead of Maine’s brutal winter. My grandmother was often forced to stretch a sack of cornmeal for a week to feed her five children, so desperate was their poverty and so absent was any form of social support. My uncle, tragically and correctly, ascertained that this would be the fate of his own young family if he did not do something. And, as my mother explained, there seemed to be only one thing to do.

There are mysteries around his death, too. Always charming, he convinced his doctors to let him spend one night at home as he was being transferred from a short-term to a long-term psychiatric facility. Why was this allowed? Why did my step-grandfather and uncles remove all the ammunition from the house, but leave guns? Somehow he’d managed to squirrel away a shotgun shell. And that was that. These mysteries are impossible to solve. They belong forever to what Sylvia Plath called, in a poem written to her young children just 15 days before her own suicide, this dark / Ceiling without a star. To come to terms with it my family had to let the what-ifs remain unresolved. They merely are. 

My uncle died in 1976. A revolution was underway far away from the limited rural healthcare system he had access to. 15 years of lobbying by leading research psychiatrists finally forced the FDA to approve a novel medication therapy for bipolar disorder, then called manic-depression. Immortalized in song by Nirvana, lithium became a life-changing and lifesaving advancement for millions. My uncle couldn’t have known this — but that’s the point. You never know what miracle might appear if you don’t stick around to find out. Surviving requires patience and faith. Clouds do recede. One climbs out of the hole a handhold at a time. Psychiatrist Carl Jung gave hypothetical advice to a depressed friend, “I would wrestle with the dark angel until he dislocated my hip. For he is also the light and the blue sky which he withholds from me.”

For every Kurt Cobain there is a Leonard Cohen. A black, unrelenting depression haunted Cohen for decades. The same year that Kurt Cobain died, Cohen took drastic action to stay alive. He entered a Buddhist monastery where he would stay for five years. “You can't avoid these issues,” he said about depression. “The only way to endure them is to get right inside them and then things change, but if you’re used to avoiding things it’s very dangerous.” Cohen was right that coping with mental illness requires a willingness to take on the darkness. But he also knew that depression is a fickle disease that doesn’t like to release anyone from its grips. In a 1997 interview he mentioned Cobain’s passing. “I always wished he had come to the concert, wished I’d been able to talk to him. I probably wouldn’t have been able to affect anything. It’s just one of those big ‘what ifs.’”

(Leonard Cohen live in Paris, 1976)

It was this seeming paradox — that suicidal depression is something you can soothe but not tame — that drove philosopher William James to one of the most important realizations in American philosophy: the will to believe, which posits that it’s appropriate in certain circumstances to adopt a belief without prior evidence of its truth. Believe that you can recover even if you have no proof that you will. In his essay “Is Life Worth Living'' — one of the few pieces that approaches the topic without cloying platitude or moralizing — James said, “for my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

Is Leonard Cohen more of a hero because he lived? Or is Kurt Cobain more of a hero because he died? The answer is neither. Suicide is perhaps best understood as an autoimmune disorder. The body attacks the body. The brain, so necessary to function, becomes a source of agony. There is no more rhyme or reason to it than there is to rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. We no longer cast moral meaning onto people suffering physical illness. That it persists with mental illness is a failing of our society. Like all diseases, suicidality requires the patient to take steps to remediate their condition, but even the most determined patient sometimes does not recover. Most do.

Contending realistically with suicide is critical. Over 20% of teenagers have seriously considered suicide. The generation born after Cobain’s death is struggling and a lack of real engagement with the subject cannot help. We need to let Kurt Cobain have his death, to come to terms with the monstrousness of suicide and engage with it realistically, rather than seek answers that sit more comfortably. We need to dispel the misconceptions and speak clearly about what suicide is and isn’t. My mother understood that there was no way to bring her brother back from the darkness and that there was no choice but to live through the long night. In the many troubles our family members have had over the years, I do believe our honesty has had an insulating effect. The pain of his suicide has never had room to be mythologized. 

Courtney Love named Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This for a reason, although she could only have half-known. The album was released only four days after Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered. Bands typically spend the build up to a major label release in a media blitz. Instead, Love spent nine torturous days trying to locate her husband. In one of the few interviews she did in between Kurt’s disappearance on March 31 and the discovery of his body on April 8, even an unsympathetic LA Times reporter noticed how fragile she seemed. “I know this should be the happiest time of my life,” she said, “and there have been moments [over the last year] where I felt that happiness … But not now. I thought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but this has been the hardest.” 

Two days before the release of Live Through This, Love recorded a tape for a public vigil in Seattle attended by more than 10,000. In it, she read part of Cobain’s note. After a line about how he loved people too much, she cried, “So why didn’t you just fucking stay?” 

(Studio version of “Asking For It”)

The album’s title appears in the song “Asking For It.” Love wails with desperation as she sings the lines, if you live through this with me / I swear that I will die for you. In the background, you can hear the whisper of a man’s voice, so soft you almost doubt it’s there. It’s Kurt. By the time the song came out, he was already gone.