"Obituary Birthday"

I hate to have back-to-back anniversary blog posts about people's deaths. Bill Hicks and Kurt died within slightly more than a month's time of each other.
I remember vividly that during April 8, 1994 I was on spring break from my school in Detroit. My mom was busy working at a college, so in a very unusual move my dad drove my sister and me solo to Athens, Georgia and Atlanta to visit my grandparents. When we started the return trip to Detroit from Atlanta I fell asleep. When I woke up somewhere in Tennessee my sister said to me, "they said on the radio that someone found a dead body at Kurt Cobain's house."
.......K.
NOW, although Kurt had attempted suicide in Italy by overdosing on Courtney Love's prescription drugs and even long before that attempt I myself concluded that he was suicidal just based on the tone and lyrics on "In Utero" (he even refers to himself in the past tense: "I did not want what I had got") I did not believe that the body was Kurt's body because I thought they would have identified him-- a world famous rock star-- immediately. We later listened to other "top-and-bottom-of-the-hour" CBS radio reports in which they reported that "an unidentified body" was found on "Kurt Cobain's property." I speculated that one of his druggie friends went to town on his drug stash and od'ed. Then maybe two hours later the word came that they had in fact identified the body as Kurt Cobain. There was a part of me that continued to disbelieve the report partly because I had seen him in concert-- my FIRST concert-- a few months earlier during October 28, 1993.
When we stopped at a hotel somewhere in Ohio to rest I tuned the TV to MTV and watched Courtney do a bizarre, rambling speech. I remember feeling some antipathy toward her at the exact moment when she refused to read part of his suicide note because "it's none of your fucking business."
...."She probably caused this somehow," I thought... And I wasn't far off the mark.
I had been on prozac for depression for almost a year at that point. Like the protagonist in "Garden State," which didn't come out until years later, I recognized for the first time that my sadness was numbed to an intolerable extent. I hated that I didn't feel much pain that day-- it was like I was watching a movie, not experiencing anything myself in the moment that it was happening.

So it was bizarre to stand at his former residence in Seattle precisely 15 years later on April 5, 2009. This clip is from a much longer piece of video that I shot that day. I have no idea why the high definition didn't transfer to Photobucket.