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Courtney after love: Dealing with her husband's suicide
Monday, March 1, 2010 @ 1:12 PM

It has been eight months since the death of Nirvana front man, Curt Cobain, and his wife, Courtney Love, the lead singer of the band Hole, has devoted her time to being on tour and playing rock & roll. “It was easier than staying home,” she shared, “It feels normal to me. You just put one foot in front of the other.”

Although her rule is to not think about the loss of her husband and the difficulties she has endured this past year, Cobain’s suicide continues to haunt her, and she desperately wonders, what would have happened, “If I could have just spoken two words to him…”

The news of Cobain’s suicide was not a shock to Love, but still, she wishes she could have done something for who she describes as her suicidal and codependent husband. Just a month before his death, on March 3, Cobain attempted to overdose during his European tour. Love woke up and found him at the end of the bed, unconscious, with a note by him saying “you don’t love me anymore. I’d rather die than go through a divorce.” “He took fifty fucking pills,” she said, “He probably forgot how many he took. But there was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling.”

Love said this suicide attempt was all in his head, sprung by the fact that she had fallen asleep on him after he planned a romantic evening for the two of them. “The rejection he must have felt after all that anticipation—I mean, for Kurt to be that Mr. Romance was pretty intense,” Love said. Now, she wishes she had just laid there for him, “All he needed was to get laid. He would have been fine.” That time, despite being in a comma for 20 hours, Cobain was fine.

After returning home to Seattle, Cobain’s suicidal attempts still lingered, on March 18 Love summoned the police to the house after Cobain locked himself in a room with a gun. “When he came home from Rome high, I flipped out. If there’s one thing in my whole life I could take back, it would be that. Getting mad at him for coming home high. I wish to God I hadn’t I wish I’d just been the way I always was, just tolerant of it. It made him feel so worthless when I got mad at him,” Love said.

Guns were a big issue with Kurt and Love and the police were constantly taking them away, Love confessed that Cobain had mentioned “blowing his head off,” many times. One time Love even talked him into letting her shoot herself first. “He brought a gun to the hospital the day after our daughter was born,” Love said. “I held the thing in my hand, and I felt that thing that they say in Schindler’s List: I’m never going to know what happens to be. And what about Frances? Sort of Rude, “’Oh, your parents died the day after you were born,”’ she said. Love then started to talk Cobain out of the suicide, and made him give her the gun.

Love called it a downward spiral after the Seattle incident. Cobain’s suicide happened on April 8, 1994 just days after he had returned from a small stint in rehab. “I was in L.A. because the interventionist said I had to leave. I did not even kiss or get to say goodbye to my husband. I wish to God…” she trailed off. “Kurt though I was on their side because I had gone along with them. I wasn’t I was afraid,” she said.

He wrote a suicide note to love, saying “I know you love you Frances, I’m so Sorry. Please don’t follow me.” “There is definitely a narcissism in what he did,” Love believes. “He thought he was doing the right thing. How could he fucking think that? In his condition he was so fucked up to think that,” Love said.

Love worries about her daughter, Frances, who will be turning two in August, “On some nights she cries out for him, and it freaks me out. And I thought she didn’t know anything. [Long Pause] So every couple of days I mention him,” she said. Love worries that when her daughter turns six or seven people will make fun of her, and make fun of her dad, “she’s gonna feel like she’s not good enough for him, and she’ll probably feel ugly,” Love said. Love wishes that he would have OD’d when he was about 34 or 35, “at least he would have had those seven years to make his
decision to be a heroin addict forever. Or whatever the hell it is he wanted.”

Love continues to carry the memory of her late husband in her recordings and performances. She described that on stage, “when the lights are blue and there are two of them in front of me, often they will symbolize Kurt’s eyes to me.” She has also been performing one of Kobain’s unrecorded songs during the encore on her tour. There are three completed songs, and ten others. “There is one called Opinions, the other goes, “Talk to me/In your own language please, the third one, I can’t sing, It’s too fucking good,…then there is a song called “Clean Up Before She Comes,”…[and] there’s the one we’re going to play tonight. Melissa sings my part, and the part I’m singing is Kurt’s part. I just call it “Drunk in Rio.”

“I recorded a whole slew of stuff in Rio that was just me and Kurt,” she began, “There’s these beautiful harmonizing with me and Kurt. Of course I can’t release the shit. No matter how aesthetically right it would be to do,”
In her new video “Doll Parts,” she uses an image of a young blond Kurt-like boy, in remembrance of her husband. “It happened. My husband was taken away. It was tasteful. I had this gorgeous little boy with me; we had a real fun time with him.”