So this is the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, just a few miles from where I now live.
I remember hearing the news, as I drove home from work on my 32nd birthday — it took three days before anyone found him — thinking how bad a thing it was but how I would now have a reminder every year. I could not have foreseen moving here back then, so that adds a little extra poignance to it. I wasn’t a huge fan, but no one could deny the talent and the raw power he — and the band — brought to bear on the age-old feelings most of us forget as we get older. I can still see the blurb in the weekend planner of my then-local paper, with a mention of Nirvana, a not yet famous but much talked about band, appearing at a club.
Skimming through the news articles (for some reason, today’s paper was delivered when we only take the Sunday edition: perhaps I need to read more about it?), I’m struck by how sick he must have been and how little he did to hide it. I think of how people like Cobain and Layne Staley, who mean so much to so many people, yet die alone at the height of their power and popularity. It’s easy to second-guess those around someone in obvious pain and wonder if anyone could have done anything to change the outcome. At the job I held last year, a world-renowned human rights advocate on the faculty took her own life and there were similar questions: why was she left alone, who talked to her last, and how did they leave her, etc. Unprofitable but understandable.
Fame doesn’t guarantee much, it seems.
