Help keep Salon independent

Kurt Cobain’s daughter marks the 30th anniversary of his death with a loving tribute

"I wish I could've known my dad," writes Frances Bean Cobain in a lengthy post to Instagram

Senior Culture Editor

Published

Frances Bean Cobain (Lexie Moreland/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)
Frances Bean Cobain (Lexie Moreland/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)

When Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994, Frances Bean — his only child with wife Courtney Love — was still in diapers. On the 30th anniversary of the Nirvana lead's passing, she looks back on a life spent without him in a loving tribute posted to Instagram, writing, "I wish I could've known my dad."

Sharing several photos of herself as a baby on their last days together before his passing, as well as a few of her dad when he was just a young boy, she remembers how Kurt's mom, Wendy, would often press her hands to her cheeks and say, with a lulling sadness, “you have his hands," breathing them in as if it were her only chance to hold him just a little bit closer.

"In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing," she writes. "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 and death, pain and joy, yin and yang, need to exist along side each other or none of this would have any meaning."

Advertisement:

Pondering the impermanent nature of human existence, she goes on to write, "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." Ending with the last line of a letter her dad wrote to her before she was born, which reads, “Wherever you go or wherever I go, I will always be with you.” 

https://www.instagram.com/p/C5YfN2YrBwM/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link


Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Related Articles