A tribute to Kurt Cobain by his daughter Frances Bean Cobain

10 April 2024

Thirty-years ago, last Friday, 5 April, Kurt Cobain, American musician, and founder of grunge act Nirvana, died.

It was one of those remember-where-you-were-when-the-news-broke moments. I was sitting on the carpeted stairs of friend’s house, as we listened to a radio report about the tragedy. We could’ve sat in the lounge room, or around the kitchen table, but somehow not being in the same room as the radio, not being in its line of sight, made the news, I don’t know, easier to process.

Or maybe we felt the need to give the clearly upset DJ, who was discussing what happened, space.

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of Cobain’s death, his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, who was twenty-months old at the time, published a tribute to her late father on her Instagram page. These are beautiful words, particularly, I thought, this excerpt:

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.