Two men

On the surface, they wouldn’t have gotten on.

I never saw my father in jeans, other than in photos from my early years or before I was born. He wore trousers, even to work. Former dress trousers now spattered with paint, despite his overalls, despite assurances that “it’s just emulsion it’ll come out in the wash”. It never did. The thought of wearing torn jeans was anathema to him, mine were a point of good hearted exasperation. He didn’t like long hair, put up with my jaw length attempt because, as my mum liked to remind him, it was always clean.

So what he’d have thought of this scruffy urchin, with his straggly hair, cardigans over pyjama tops, over handmade band t-shirts, flannel trousers trailing under torn denims, poking through holes in knees, seats, halfway up the leg, is anyone’s guess.

But these two men were my polestars. One was the manshaped, mansized cornerstone for as long as I could remember. The other crashed into my life when I was a ball of hormones and confusion, an alien to my father, twenty something years removed from that experience, further distanced by my sensitive disposition.

Kurt Cobain got me. He was angry and sad and confused like me. He had bad posture and stomach problems like me. His songs spoke to me on a primal, visceral level, anguished screams that were somehow the exact (in)articulation of how I felt.

Within thirteen months of one another, they were both gone. My father’s death winded me, left me concussed and punch drunk. Music, as ever, pulled me through. I channeled my rage, my brokenness into the albums and songs I loved, mostly furious squalls of noise, punctuated with passages of wonky melody, a mixture of the profound, the profane and the surreal. I devoured it, bathed in it, displayed it across my chest, like a shield, daring the world to hurt me, denying that I hurt more deeply than even I knew.

And then Kurt died. I was at a friend’s house, staying over. I’d never stayed there before, and had left his number with my mum for emergencies. She called on Saturday afternoon to tell me that a body had been found at Kurt’s home and that it was probably him. I don’t remember anything else about the conversation. I don’t remember much else about that day or night, except the DJ playing three Nirvana songs back to back at my mate’s eighteenth birthday party. It was a joint party with his cousin. His cousin was not best pleased, as 15 indie and metal kids threw themselves around the dancefloor to Smells Like Teen Spirit, Aneurysm and Territorial Pissings. But we needed it.

And then, it was time to get back to normal. Even among my friends, Kurt was just a guy in a band we loved. He was dead, and that was sad, but we didn’t know him.

And we didn’t.

But his death, for me, wasn’t really about him. I had just staggered back to my feet when the sucker punch came. My heart was broken already when it shattered again.

And maybe this is dramatic, but at 17 that’s how I felt. I had everyone telling me to be a man, but the two men I looked to were gone.

Grief doesn’t have an end point. It’s not a destination. But the journey got harder when these stars were dimmed in my sky, one after the other.