By Danielle Yampuler

A myth like Kurt Cobain can play God forever. A woman like Courtney Love will never even be an angel.

In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain picks up a shotgun and becomes God. He flies higher and higher in the sky just to find that his wings cannot melt, so the sun swallows him whole.

The supernova of the world’s youngest and brightest star leaves behind an acute darkness. Kurt’s only been famous for three years, but he changes the world in his wake. He was the newly christened voice of a generation, the messiah of the outcasts. Five days after his death, thousands of fans gather for a vigil. Each holds a candle in their hand, attempting to recreate the light he emanated. A scratchy, congested voice plays from a speaker to the crowd. It’s a recording by Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife. She sounds like she’s been crying for days. She’s lying alone in the bed she and Kurt once shared, reading his note.

Kurt wrote of loving too much, of being too much. Of feeling that his music and performances no longer evoked anything in him. He wrote of not being able to handle his audience, their adoration for him. As she reads his note, Courtney begs with words that feel worn out, tired of pleading the same thing over and over to a man who won’t listen. She begs him to just step away from being a rock star, to enjoy what he has. She ridicules his inability to. It’s too late for him to hear it.

She’s angry, she’s sobbing, she feels as empty as she ever has. Their daughter, Frances, is in the other room. She’s barely two years old.

“And don't remember this, cause this is a fucking lie!” she growls out, before reading the end of Kurt’s note. “It's better to burn out than to fade away.”

Since her husband died, Courtney spends most of her time in bed. Kurt’s mother keeps her company. It is there that she rethinks every moment of her and Kurt’s life together, searching, scavenging for anything she could have done to prevent this.

Maybe she should have tried harder to get them both sober. Kurt figured out early that drugs were an easy way to numb the constant thoughts that raced through his head. He first started using heroin under the nose of his previous girlfriend. Courtney also used. Their mutual addiction made it hard for either to quit. The couple had checked themselves into separate rehab facilities, but he broke out. He died one week later, a bullet in his skull and a lethal dose of heroin in his veins.

Maybe she should have never left his side — not since he locked himself in a room with a gun and threatened to set it off. Not since he swallowed over 50 pills with a glass of champagne.

Maybe she should have never said a single fucking thing to that journalist. Vanity Fair’s 1992 article was, to an extent, the beginning of his end. The magazine quoted Courtney saying that she had used heroin early in her pregnancy. CPS temporarily removed their newborn daughter over the public outcry the story caused. Kurt and Courtney got their child back quickly, but the loss would linger. The couple became erratic, paranoid. They sent death threats to journalists. They refused most interviews.  The media became a predator, one intent on ripping them limb from limb and sewing them into something they could no longer recognize. Their bodies were not their own. Their daughter was not their own.

Courtney tries to shake the thoughts out of her head, tries to quiet her mind enough to sleep. She rolls over in bed and stares at the sleeping form of Kurt’s mother. In the dark like this, she can believe her skinny frame is his instead. The deep ache in her chest sharpens.

Two days after the vigil, Courtney’s band Hole releases a new album, “Live Through This”. This shocks a public who expects her to drown in grief. The brevity of the couple’s four-year romance compounds the public’s suspicions: Courtney married Kurt too quickly, had his child too quickly, and then he died too quickly. Rumors fly of a black widow who killed her husband for his estate and fame.

These rumors neglect that Courtney is simply grieving the way she does all things — loudly, publicly, whether others like it or not. Despite its recording the year prior to Cobain’s death, her new album is all about grief. Grief over the loss of her child, over her loss of control, over the slow loss of her husband. Everything had been taken from her, again and again, until she had to scream about it.

Four months after the album’s release, Courtney looks over a roaring crowd, every eye locked upon her. She looks just as she always does — her hair is messy, bleach-blonde, chopped to her shoulders. Her dress is vintage and torn. Her lips are red. This is her first performance since her husband died, and his ghost hangs over everything she does. The crowd feels it, and so does she. “They really want you, and I do too.” His absence is such a presence that he practically takes corporal form next to her.

The crowd wants to watch Courtney fall apart. Luckily for them, she has never tried to be put-together. She self-identifies as an amalgamation of doll parts, like the ones her late husband collected. She is always ready to break apart. They should know this about her by now.

Kurt was obsessed with his image. He was known for thinking his words over, lest he said the wrong thing and was misinterpreted. Courtney lays everything out on the table. Her mouth is as quick as her brain. She starts fights with little intent to finish them. She’s brash, loud. Where Kurt always cared for how he was perceived, Courtney builds her brand on chaos. That was probably what he loved about her: her ability to verbalize the things he could never dream of saying.

When Courtney performs, it’s messy. She screams the things she sang on the album. She is all flesh and blood and never tries to act as though she is anything more than human. When she tells the audience, “Someday you will ache like I ache,” they can see her guts spill out onto the stage. Every performance of the “Live Through This” tour is a funeral for the one who didn’t.

“I want him! He’s all gone!” she screams, changing the lyrics of a song that she had previously written about losing her child. “Where is my baby? Who took my baby?”

She asks the question, but she knows the answer. As she looks out over the crowd, she knows that they took her daughter from her. They took Kurt from her. They’ll keep on taking, for as long as they’re allowed.

However, “Live Through This” is not just about loss. It’s about waking up to a world that would take everything from you and facing it regardless.

In “Asking For It”, Courtney promises this: “If you live through this with me, I swear that I will die for you.” This line is the thesis of the album, and she repeats it, like a prayer. This refers to the media circus that surrounded their lives. Kurt’s voice is mixed into the backing vocals. He sings the line with her, but his voice is murky and hard to discern. They were making a promise to each other, one he broke when he died. For better or for worse, Courtney refuses to die for someone who can’t live for her.

A few years after Kurt’s death, Courtney still constantly contemplates his final words. She still hates them. She writes down this lyric, a response of sorts: “It’s better to rise than fade away.” In words less eloquent, she is saying: I am not going to burn out for any fucking one of you. I’d rather live.

Maybe that’s the best thing a star can do: rise above it all. To refuse to give any more of yourself to a public that doesn’t know the difference between loving someone and killing them. In her refusal to burn out or fade away, Courtney remained distinctly human.

Coutney lives the rest of her life in the public eye, and some rightfully question whether she should have. She says unforgivable things to her fans. She has a knack for turning friends into enemies, and she assaults more than a couple of them. She continues her drug use throughout her daughter’s childhood, in Frances’s view. The woman, regardless of her pain, is infamous for a reason.

Kurt tied up his image neatly. He was a rock legend, and he died at the peak of his legacy, forever immortalizing himself as untouchable. No one has to question what Kurt would have been like in his old age, whether his voice would have continued to resonate with the youth of today. One could even wonder if his death was the best thing he ever did for himself.

To that, Courtney would respond: Fuck you. ■