It's Better to Burn Out than Fade Away-Kurt Cobain

Chapter 167

February 20, 2019

"Please give a warm welcome to...Ruby Hawke!" The interviewer, Francine, shouted. 

I walked onstage and everyone clapped for me. I gave her a hug and then sat down in a chair. 

"How are you today?" She asked me. 

"I'm good," I nodded my head. 

"That's good. Now I do understand that today is the late Kurt Cobain's birthday."

"Yeah," I nodded my head slowly. "He would've been fifty-two today."

"Well, we are here today to talk about Ruby's biography, 'Breaking and Mending'. Tell me, Ruby, what inspired that title?"

"It's one of Kurt's songs 'Dumb'. One of the lyrics in the song is, 'My heart is broke but I have some glue. Help me inhale and mend it with you.' I don't like Nirvana, but there were a couple of songs that I really enjoyed, but 'Dumb' was my favorite. Most of the book was about Kurt, so I wanted to kind of pay a tribute to him."

"Alright, well, what most of the world didn't know was that you had a previous boyfriend who had died, but that was one of your daughter's fathers-Lorelai. She grew up thinking that Kurt was her dad though, correct?"

"Eh, not necessarily. After Robert died, I met Kurt (a while later) and we agreed to have him be the father of Lorelai. He wanted to. But, after Kurt died, I got rid of every trace of him so that Lorelai and Melissa wouldn't remember him."

"Ohh, I see. Now, you and Kurt were a very interesting couple."

I chuckled. "Well, it depends on what you mean by interesting."

"You described each other as 'feeding into each other's negativity'. What do you think you mean by that?"

"In the beginning of our relationship, things were very healthy and there were almost no problems. But then, in 1993, things went downhill and we were both having a very hard time. He was gone touring a lot, but I couldn't go with him because I had to stay at home with the kids. That caused me to feel really lonely and I was always either angry or upset. Kurt was either doing drugs or being angry at something. We didn't know how to deal with what we were feeling, so we kind of just made our emotions more intense."

"How did you deal with Kurt's death?"

I sighed, never knowing how to answer that question. Not even after twenty five years. "I didn't. I locked myself in my bedroom and I didn't speak. I hurt myself and I got my kids taken away from me. I was depressed. But, after a little while, I got my stuff together and I became a new person. I was obviously still hurting, but I shoved those emotions deep down. I saved them for my therapist. But even then, I obviously never fully got over it. Then, I met Ethan Hawke," I turned to look at him in the audience and I waved at him and blew him a kiss. He did the same to me. "He helped me get through so much of that. I mean, I am forever grateful for that and I don't even know how I will repay him for that."

"What day did you decide, 'I'm going to stop treating myself like this?'"

"What do you mean?"

"When you were going through mourning Kurt."

"Oh, oh. Um," I chuckled, thinking about the exact day. "It was the day that my parents were going to let me have my kids again. I had heard that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich of Metallica made a joke about Kurt's death."

"What was the joke?"

"Okay, so I am very very protective over the people that I love, alright? Keep in mind that I was a huge fan of Metallica growing up and I absolutely loved their music. They were my favorite band. But after this, I lost all respect for them. James was onstage-two months after Kurt had died-and said, 'What color were Kurt Cobain's eyes? Blue. One blew this way; one blew that way.'"