Epilogue
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
APRIL 1994–MAY 1999
Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally.
—From “Pennyroyal Tea.”
Early Friday, April 8, electrician Gary Smith arrived at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard. Smith and several other workers had been at the house since Thursday, installing a new security system. Police stopped by twice and told workers to alert them if Kurt arrived. At 8:40 Friday, Smith was near the greenhouse and glanced inside. “I saw this body laying there on the floor,” he later told a newspaper. “I thought it was a mannequin. Then I noticed it had blood in the right ear. I saw a shotgun laying across his chest, pointing up at his chin.” Smith called police, and then his company. A friend of his firm’s dispatcher took it upon himself to tip off radio station KXRX. “Hey, you guys are going to owe me some pretty good Pink Floyd tickets for this,” he told DJ Marty Riemer. Police confirmed that a body of a young male had been found at Cobain’s house and KXRX aired the story. Though police were not identifying the deceased, initial news reports speculated it was Kurt. Within twenty minutes, KXRX received a tearful phone call from Kim Cobain, who identified herself as Kurt’s sister, and angrily asked why they were broadcasting such a fallacious rumor. They told her to call the police.
Kim did, and after hearing the news, she phoned her mother. An Aberdeen Daily World reporter showed up on Wendy’s doorstep soon after. Her quote would go on the Associated Press wire and be reprinted around the world: “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.” She was referring to the coincidence that Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt had all died at age 27. But something else his mother said wasn’t reported in any other newspaper—though every parent who heard the news of Kurt’s death didn’t need to read it to know the loss she felt. At the end of her interview Wendy said of her only son, “I’ll never hold him again. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”
Don heard about his son’s death from the radio—he was too broken up to talk to any reporters. Leland and Iris learned from watching television. Iris had to lie down after the news—she wasn’t sure if her weakened heart could take it.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Courtney had become a patient in Exodus, having checked in on Thursday evening. On Thursday she had been arrested at the Peninsula after police had arrived at her “vomit and blood-spattered room” and found a syringe, a blank prescription pad, and a small packet they believed to be heroin (the substance turned out to be Hindu good-luck ashes). After being released on $10,000 bail, she checked into inpatient treatment, giving up on her hotel detox.
Friday morning Rosemary Carroll arrived at Exodus. When Courtney saw the expression on Rosemary’s face, she knew the news without having to even hear it. The two women looked at each other for several moments in complete silence until Courtney finally uttered a one-word question: “How?”
Courtney left Los Angeles in a Learjet with Frances, Rosemary, Eric Erlandson, and nanny Jackie Farry. When they arrived at the Lake Washington house, it was surrounded by television news crews. Love promptly hired private security guards, who placed tarps over the greenhouse so media couldn’t peer in. Prior to the coverings going up, Seattle Times photographer Tom Reese shot a few frames of the greenhouse through a hole in the fence. “I thought it might not be him,” Reese remembered, “that it could be anyone. But when I saw that sneaker there, I knew.” Reese’s photograph, which ran on the front page of Saturday’s Seattle Times, showed the view through the French doors, including half of Kurt’s body, his straight leg, his sneaker, and his clenched fist next to a cigar box.
By afternoon, the King County Medical Examiner’s office had issued a statement confirming what everyone already knew: “The autopsy has shown that Cobain died of a shotgun wound to the head and at this time the wound appears to be self-inflicted.” Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne performed the autopsy—the task was particularly emotional because Hartshorne had once promoted a Nirvana gig in college. “We put ‘ap-parent’ self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in the report at the time because we still wanted to cross all our t’s and dot all our i’s,” Hartshorne recalled. “There was absolutely nothing that indicated it was anything other than a suicide.” Still, because of the media attention and Kurt’s celebrity, Seattle Police didn’t complete their full investigation for 40 days, and spent over 200 hours interviewing Kurt’s friends and family.
Despite rumors to the contrary, the corpse was recognizable as Kurt, though the scene was ghastly: The hundreds of pellets from the shotgun shell had expanded his head and disfigured him. Police fingerprinted the body, and the prints matched those already on file from the domestic violence arrest. Though a later analysis of the shotgun concluded “four cards of lifted latent prints contain no legible prints,” Hartshorne said the prints on the gun were not legible because the weapon had to be pried from Kurt’s hand after rigor mortis had set in. “I know his fingerprints are on there, because he had it in his hand,” Hartshorne explained. The date of death was determined to be April 5, though it could have been 24 hours before or after. In all likelihood, Kurt had been dead in the greenhouse while several searches of the main house occurred.
The autopsy found evidence of benzodiazepines (tranquilizers) and heroin in Kurt’s blood. The level of heroin found was so high that even Kurt—notorious for his enormous habit—may not have survived much longer than it took to fire the gun. He had pulled off a feat that was quite remarkable, though it bore similarities to his Uncle Burle’s actions (gunshots to both the head and abdomen) and those of his great-grandfather James Irving (knife to abdomen, and later ripping the wound apart): Kurt had managed to kill himself twice, using two methods that were equally fatal.
Courtney was inconsolable. She insisted police give her Kurt’s blood-speckled corduroy coat, which she wore. When the cops finally left the grounds, and with only a security guard as a witness, she retraced Kurt’s last steps, entered the greenhouse—which had yet to be cleaned—and immersed her hands in his blood. On her knees on the floor, she prayed, howled, and wailed, held her blood-covered hands up to the sky, and screamed “Why?” She found a small remnant of Kurt’s skull with hair attached. She washed and shampooed this gruesome souvenir. And then she began blotting out her pain with drugs.
That night she wore layers of Kurt’s clothes because they still smelled of him. Wendy arrived at the house, and mother and daughter-in-law slept in the same bed, clutching each other during the night.
On Saturday, April 9, Jeff Mason was employed to take Courtney to the funeral home to view Kurt’s body before it was cremated—she had already requested that plaster casts be made of his hands. Grohl was also invited, and declined, but Krist came, arriving before Courtney. He spent a few private moments with his old friend and broke down crying. As he left, Courtney and Mason were brought into the viewing room. Kurt was on a table, dressed in his nicest clothes, but his eyes had been sewn shut. It was the first time Courtney had been with her husband for ten days, and it was the last time their physical bodies would be together. She stroked his face, spoke to him, and clipped a lock of his hair. Then she pulled his pants down and cut a small lock of his pubic hair—his beloved pubes, the hair he had waited so long for as an adolescent, somehow these needed to be preserved. Finally, she climbed on top of his body, straddling him with her legs, and put her head on his chest and wailed: “Why? Why? Why?”
That day friends had begun to arrive to comfort Courtney, and many brought drugs, which she indiscriminately ingested. Between the drugs and her grief, she was a catastrophe. Reporters phoned every five minutes, and though she wasn’t in much shape to talk, she occasionally took the calls but to ask questions, not answer them: “Why had Kurt done this? Where had he been that last week?” As with many grief-stricken lovers, she focused on the tiny details so as to avoid her loss. She spent two hours on the phone with thePost-Intelligencer’s Gene Stout pondering such musings and announcing, “I’m tough and I can take anything. But I can’t take this.” Kurt’s death made the front page of the New York Times, and dozens of television and newspaper reporters descended on Seattle, trying to cover a story where few sources would talk to the media. Most filed think-pieces about what Kurt meant to a generation. What else could be said?
A funeral needed to be arranged. Soundgarden’s Susan Silver stepped forward and scheduled a private service in a church, and a simultaneous public candlelight vigil at Seattle Center. That weekend, a slow procession of friends arrived at the Lake Washington house— everyone seemed shell-shocked, trying to make sense of the unexplainable. Added to their grief was physical discomfort: When Jeff Mason arrived Friday, he found the oil tank completely dry. To heat the huge house, he began to send limos out to buy kindling from Safeway. “I was breaking up chairs because the fireplace was the only way to heat the house,” he recalled. Courtney was upstairs in their bedroom, wrapped in layers of Kurt’s clothes, recording a message to be played at the public memorial.
On Sunday afternoon the public candlelight vigil was held at Seattle Center’s Flag Pavilion, and 7,000 attended, carrying candles, flowers, homemade signs, and a few burning flannel shirts. A suicide counselor spoke and urged struggling teens to ask for help, while local DJs shared memories. A short message from Krist was played:
We remember Kurt for what he was: caring, generous, and sweet. Let’s keep the music with us. We’ll always have it forever. Kurt had an ethic towards his fans that was rooted in the punk rock way of thinking: No band is special; no player royalty. If you’ve got a guitar, and a lot of soul, just bang something out and mean it—you are the superstar. Plug in the tones and rhythms that are universally human. Music. Heck, use your guitar as a drum. Just catch a groove and let it flow out of your heart. That’s the level that Kurt spoke to us on: in our hearts. And that’s where the music will always be, forever.
Courtney’s tape was played next. She had recorded it late the night before in their bed. She began:
I don’t know what to say. I feel the same way you guys do. If you guys don’t think that to sit in this room, where he played guitar and sang, and feel so honored to be near him, you’re crazy. Anyway, he left a note. It’s more like a letter to the fucking editor. I don’t know what happened. I mean, it was gonna happen, but it could’ve happened when he was 40. He always said he was gonna outlive everybody and be 120. I’m not gonna read you all the note, because it’s none of the rest of your fucking business. But some of it is to you. I don’t really think it takes away his dignity to read this, considering that it’s addressed to most of you. He’s such an asshole. I want you all to say “asshole” really loud.
The crowd shouted “asshole.” And then Courtney read the suicide note. Over the course of the next ten minutes, she mixed Kurt’s final words with her own comments on them. When she read the section where Kurt mentioned Freddie Mercury, she yelled: “Well, Kurt, so fucking what! Then don’t be a rock star, you asshole.” Where he wrote of having “too much love,” she asked, “So, why didn’t you just fucking stay?” And when she quoted his line about being a “sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man,” she wailed: “Shut up! Bastard. Why didn’t you just enjoy it?” Though she was reading the note to the crowd— and the media—she spoke as if Kurt were her only audience. Toward the end, before reading the Neil Young line Kurt quoted, she warned: “And don’t remember this because this a fucking lie: ‘It’s better to burn out, than fade away.’ God, you asshole!” She finished the note, and then added:
Just remember, this is all bullshit! But I want you to know one thing: That eighties “tough love” bullshit, it doesn’t work. It’s not real. It doesn’t work. I should have let him, we all should have let him, have his numbness. We should have let him have the thing that made him feel better, that made his stomach feel better, we should have let him have it instead of trying to strip away his skin. You go home, and you tell your parents, “Don’t you ever try that tough love bullshit on me, because it doesn’t fucking work.” That’s what I think. I’m laying in our bed, and I’m really sorry, and I feel the same way you do. I’m really sorry, you guys. I don’t know what I could have done. I wish I’d have been here. I wish I hadn’t listened to other people. But I did. Every night I’ve been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and I think it’s him because their bodies are sort of the same. I have to go now. Just tell him, he’s a fucker, okay? Just say, “Fucker, you’re a fucker.” And that you love him.
As Courtney’s extraordinary tape was being played at the Seattle Center, across town 70 people gathered at the Unity Church of Truth for the private memorial. “There was no time for a program or invitations,” remembered Reverend Stephen Towles, who presided. Most attendees had been invited by phone the previous night. Several of Kurt’s closest friends—including Jesse Reed—were overlooked or couldn’t make it on such short notice. The crowd included a contingent from Gold Mountain and several carloads of friends from Olympia. Bob Hunter, Kurt’s old art teacher, was one of the few from Aberdeen. Even Kurt’s ex-girlfriend Mary Lou Lord came and sat in the back. Courtney and Frances were in the front flanked by Wendy and Kim; the Cobain women seemed to be the only thing stopping Courtney from collapse. Don and Jenny and Leland came; Iris was too ill. Tracy Marander was there and was as distraught as the family—she had been as close to Kurt as his blood kin.
Inside the church, mourners found pictures of Kurt as a six-year-old laid out on the pews. Towles began with the 23rd Psalm, and then said: “Like a wind crying through the universe, time carries with it the names and deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, and all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way but for a brief moment. We are here to remember and release Kurt Cobain, who lived a short life that was long in accomplishment.” Towles recited the story of the Golden Buddha who spent years hidden under a coating of clay before his true worth was known, and followed that with a poem titled “The Traveler.” He then asked the crowd to consider a series of questions, designed to make them ponder the deceased. He asked: “Was there unfinished business between you?” If Towles had called for a show of hands in response, the room would have been filled with raised arms.
Towles then urged others to step forward and share their memories. Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop spoke first and said, “I love you, I respect you. Of course, I’m a few days late in expressing it.” Dylan Carlson read from a Buddhist text. Krist read from prepared notes, similar to his taped message.
Danny Goldberg told of the contradictions in Kurt, how he said he hated fame, yet complained when his videos weren’t played. Goldberg said Kurt’s love for Courtney “was one of the things that kept him going,” despite his ongoing depression. And Goldberg spoke of Aberdeen, albeit with a New Yorker’s perspective: “Kurt came from a town that no one had ever heard of, and he went on to change the world.”
And then Courtney stood, and read with the actual suicide note in her hands. She yelled, cried, wept, and mixed Kurt’s note with selections from the Bible’s Book of Job. She ended by talking about Boddah, and how much this imaginary friend meant to Kurt. Almost no one in the hall knew who she was speaking of, but the mention of Kurt’s childhood imaginary friend was enough to make Wendy, Don, Kim, Jenny, and Leland quietly sob. Reverend Towles ended the ceremony with a reading from Matthew 5:43.
As the service ended the old feuds returned. Mary Lou Lord exited, afraid for her life. Don and Wendy barely spoke. And one of Kurt’s Olympia friends was so offended by Danny Goldberg’s comments that he circulated a parody the next day by fax. But nowhere was the divisiveness more apparent than in the scheduling of two competing wakes after the service. One was held by Krist and Shelli and the other by Courtney, and only a handful of mourners visited both. Courtney was late to the wake at her house since after the ceremony she had ventured to the candlelight vigil. There she handed out some of Kurt’s clothing to fans who were astounded to see her clutching the suicide note. “It was unbelievable,” recalled security guard James Kirk. “It wasn’t in a plastic bag or anything. She would show it to the kids, and say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ ” On her way back home, Courtney stopped by radio station KNDD, and demanded air time. “I want to go on the air and make them stop playing Billy Corgan and just play Kurt,” she announced. The station politely turned her away.
A week later, Courtney received the urn of Kurt’s ashes. She took a handful and buried them under a willow tree in front of the house. In May, she took the rest in a teddy-bear backpack and traveled to the Namgyal Buddhist monastery near Ithaca, New York, where she sought consecration for the ashes and absolution for herself. The monks blessed the remains and used a handful to make a tsatsa memorial sculpture.
The bulk of Kurt’s remains sat in an urn in 171 Lake Washington Boulevard until 1997, when Courtney sold the home. She moved to Beverly Hills with Frances and Kurt’s urn. Before selling the house, she insisted on a covenant allowing her to return one day and remove the willow tree.
Five years after Kurt’s suicide, on May 31, 1999, Memorial Day, Wendy organized a final service for her son. The plan was for Frances to scatter Kurt’s ashes in a creek behind Wendy’s house while a Buddhist monk recited a prayer. Courtney and Frances were already in the Northwest that week vacationing. Since Kurt’s death, Courtney had become close to Wendy, and had purchased her a $400,000 house on acreage just outside of Olympia. It was behind this house that the service was planned, and a handful of family and friends were invited. Though Wendy wouldn’t call Don herself, Courtney’s managers invited him, and he came. But some of the internal family feuds continued: Leland, who was only 30 minutes away—and spent most of his days alone in his trailer since Iris died, in 1997—wasn’t called. Courtney did invite Tracy Marander, and she came, wanting to say a final good-bye to Kurt. When Tracy arrived and saw Frances, she was taken aback by the girl’s beauty—barefoot, wearing a purple dress, her eyes looking remarkably like those of a boy Tracy had once loved. It was a thought Courtney has every day of her life.
Over the years since Kurt’s death, many had suggested a memorial be erected in Aberdeen, and his birthplace might have also served as an appropriate location to scatter his ashes. Scattering Kurt under his mythmaking bridge would have been a kind of rough justice and literal irony; for the first time, he would sleep there.
But instead, as the monk chanted, six-year-old Frances Bean Cobain scattered her father’s ashes into McLane Creek, and they dissolved and floated downstream. In many ways, this too was a fitting resting place. Kurt had found his true artistic muse in Olympia, and less than five miles away he sat in a shitty little apartment that smelled of rabbit pee and wrote songs all day. Those songs would outlive Kurt and even his darkest demons. As his one-time foster father Dave Reed once remarked, in as good a summation of Kurt’s life as was ever offered: “He had the desperation, not the courage, to be himself. Once you do that, you can’t go wrong, because you can’t make any mistakes when people love you for being yourself. But for Kurt, it didn’t matter that other people loved him; he simply didn’t love himself enough.”
There was another larger piece of fate, and a nugget of ancient history that bonded this particular plot of water and earth and air with these mortal remains; just over the hill, less than ten miles away, the source of McLane Creek and all the streams in the area, was the small range of Washington mountains known as the Black Hills. It was here, years ago, where a young family would go sledding after the first cold snap. They would drive their Camaro down the two-lane road, past the tiny logging town of Porter, up a funny little hill called Fuzzy Top Mountain. In the car was a mom, a dad, a baby daughter, and a little six-year-old boy with the same ethereal blue eyes as Frances Cobain. The boy loved nothing in the world more than sledding with his family, and during the drive from Aberdeen he would implore his father to drive faster because he couldn’t stand to wait. When the Camaro would come to a stop near the summit of Fuzzy Top, the boy would dash out, grab his Flexible Flyer sled, take a running start down the mountain, and race as if his flight alone could somehow stop time. At the bottom of the hill, he would wave his mitten-covered hand at his family, and a wide, warm smile would come over his face, his blue eyes sparkling in the winter sun.