Originally appeared on E! Online
Frances Bean Cobain is mourning what could have been.
The 31-year-old—whose father Kurt Cobain died by suicide in 1994, when she was 20 months old—looked back at what little time she spent with the Nirvana singer. In a heartbreaking message marking the 30th anniversary of his death, Frances wrote, “I wish I could’ve known my Dad.”
“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,” she shared in an April 5 Instagram post. “I always wondered if he would’ve caught tadpoles with me during the muggy Washington summers, or if he smelled of Camel Lights & strawberry nesquik (his favorites, I’ve been told).”
But despite her grief, the visual artist noted that Kurt “gifted me a lesson in death that can only come through the LIVED experience of losing someone.”
“In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing,” she explained. “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. It is the impermanent nature of human existence which throws us into the depths of our most authentic lives.”
For Frances, whose mom is Courtney Love, the lesson she learned through her grieving journey is “knowing for certain, when we love ourselves & those around us with compassion, with openness, with grace, the more meaningful our time here inherently becomes.”
The former model went on to cite the final line in a letter her dad had written to her before her birth, reading, “‘Wherever you go or wherever I go, I will always be with you.'”
“He kept this promise because he is present in so many ways,” she continued. “Whether it’s by hearing a song or through the hands we share, in those moments I get to spend a little time with my dad & he feels transcendent.”
Frances added, “To anyone who has wondered what it would’ve looked like to live along side the people they have lost, I’m holding you in my thoughts today. The meaning of our grief is the same.”