There is something off in the wind that blows through Aberdeen, Washington. It is a town with a subtle dissonance. When you go down the streets of Aberdeen, you feel a depressed tension. It’s faint, but it lingers as it passes through you. Here you will find boarded windows, crumbling porches, strip malls, bars, and churches; churches outnumber everything else. The last time there was any prosperity in Aberdeen was during the 1920s when the town’s lumber and logging industries were flourishing. By the 1970s, the era of Kurt Cobain’s childhood, most of their natural resources were logged. After the industries went and left—nothing ever came to replace them. It is the ideal town to escape from. 

When I was sixteen years old, my mother told me that she’d take me on a trip anywhere within the confines of the United States. More than anything else, I wanted to see the relics of Kurt Cobain’s past. I wanted to trace his life through the places he had once passed through: his childhood home, the bridge he claimed to live under, and the home he spent his last days in. 

When I was sixteen, I loved Kurt Cobain. I loved him because I conceptualized him, and he was therefore limitless. He was a romantic notion, a mystery to be solved, a colossus. He was a walking contradiction. Eloquent and composed in interviews yet vulnerable and explosive on stage. He created the sounds that pulled the sky over me and never asked for anything in return. 

When I was thirteen years old, my father drove me to school, and most days we would roll the windows down and listen to classical music on the radio. Very occasionally, however, we would listen to the Classic Rock station. During one of these rides, some Nirvana song played, but I had my headphones in. Out of the blue, my dad turned the volume down and said to me, “you seem like someone who’d listen to Nirvana,” like some sort of prophet. I was mortified. My father was the type of dad who covered his beer belly with Hawaiian shirts—he was the last person I wanted to get music recommendations from. 

He died of cancer a few months after.

I don’t remember how it felt the first time I truly kissed someone, but I do remember how I felt the first time I listened to Nirvana. It was “All Apologies,” and I was fourteen. It was one of the few Nirvana songs on my mom’s iPod. In other words, it was one of the only songs written by the band that tiptoed my mother’s caliber for what was taboo and what was permissible. Unlike most of their songs, which my mother describes as loud noise, “All Apologies” has a melodic and mystical languor. I played it on the car’s stereo as I rested my face in my palm as though it were too heavy for my neck. I felt embarrassed to be in the same space as her, as though she caught me kissing a stranger. 

From that moment on, it became my mission to reconstruct Kurt Cobain. I read every biography ever written about Nirvana, watched archived concerts and any old interview I could find online, and listened to their entire discography over and over again. Otherwise, I listened to any artist Kurt Cobain ever listed as an influence: The Melvins, Lead Belly, Black Flag, The Meat Puppets, David Bowie, The Vaselines, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Daniel Johnston. I’d see if I could decipher where the influence lay. I started dressing like him too. I wore flannels, tarnished jeans, and oversized cardigans and walked to school smoking cigarettes with my back slouched over. 

And so, my mom and I took a six-and-a-half-hour flight from New York City to Seattle, rented a car, and drove two hours to Aberdeen. As we drove down the town’s main strip, my mom told me that the “sad town” reminded her of the stories my dad told her about his life when he came to America. 

My dad was born in The Netherlands the year after World War II ended. When he was a young boy, his family decided to uproot and move to Colombia to start a paint manufacturing business. On account of arriving in Colombia at the beginning of the ten-year civil war referred to as La Violencia, his family’s fortune was lost, his parents divorced, and he moved to a sad town in Florida. His mother became a cabaret singer in a bar to rent the back of a truck for my father and his siblings to live in. Often the family worried about not having enough to eat and once someone broke my father’s nose for not speaking English well enough.  

I have a deep appreciation for artists who grew up in these forgotten sad towns. There is a particular beauty about those who create despite all odds. Those who, despite difficult circumstances, see a world worth making art about. My father pursued photography because he saw in Florida a place worth capturing with a camera lens. Kurt Cobain pursued music because he saw in Aberdeen a place worth writing a song about. In both cases, and in the case for artists from sad towns, their first goal is to leave. 

In May of 2013, my mom dropped me off in front of Kurt Cobain’s childhood home or she might have come with me, I can’t remember. I stood in front of 1210 East First Street, the rundown cottage he managed to escape, with a storm of thoughts in my mind and a billowing rain cloud over my head. His childhood home was a time capsule, the means to preserve the impression of a mythologized man. 

As I stood, I watched his life unfold. 

In the kitchen, Kurt is nine years old as his parents explain to him that they are going to file for divorce. In the living room, he is fourteen and his uncle gifted him his first model bass guitar from Sears. In his old bedroom, he is sixteen, playing Led Zeppelin records while spray-painting their logo on the wall. In the basement, he is seventeen, coming up with a proper band name with his bassist, Krist Novoselic. After going through a succession of provocative possibilities, including Fecal Matter, Skid Row, and Ted Ed Fred, they decide to go with “Nirvana.”

On the front porch, he is eighteen, yelling at his mom and threatening to move out because he can’t stand her lecherous and abusive boyfriend. In response, she tells him that she can’t stand that he’s an unemployed high school dropout. A week later he finds all his belongings packed away in boxes. 

When Kurt was kicked out of his house, he crashed on the couches of friends and when he couldn’t, he slept underneath the Young Street Bridge—a bridge two blocks away from his actual home. When, in “Something in the Way,” Kurt sings, “underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak, and the animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets,” he was alluding to this place. The thing about Nirvana is that their funniest lines are also their saddest. 

By the time we drove from the house to the bridge, it began to rain, and my mom waited in the car because she didn’t want her hair to get wet. The bridge covered a brief span along the dirty Wishkah river, and the walls of the bridge were completely covered in Nirvana-related graffiti. There were also plenty of curious monuments commissioned by Aberdeen including a plaque that stated, “Welcome to NIRVANA” and a 13-foot statue of an electric guitar—monuments that, I imagine, Kurt would have sneered at. 

I sat down underneath the bridge to shield myself from the rain and because I didn’t know what else to do, I wondered what the bridge looked like in 1987, before the fan graffiti and the monuments, and how it must have felt to sleep underneath it knowing you had no other option. 

Sometimes I felt too much like Kurt Cobain. My mom moved on quickly after my dad died from cancer. Just months after his funeral, her fragile and emotionally stunted boyfriend moved in. One time after my mom and I returned from a trip to the grocery store, he pulled me aside. He lowered his voice and asked me if my mom spoke to any other man while we were out. At that moment, I understood the appeal of living underneath a bridge. 

My parents slept in the same bed for fifteen years and I slept in the bedroom next to theirs. When my dad died, my mom and I slept together in the master bedroom because she told me that it felt too strange to sleep alone after sleeping next to someone else for so long. I didn’t mind. When the boyfriend moved in, he and my mother moved to my old bedroom, and I took the master. The house’s walls were thin, and it felt as though they waited until the middle of the night to bicker. Even when they finished arguing, I’d just lay there, sleepless, in my parent’s bed. 

Instead of a bridge, I had a porch. I would wear my winter coat over my pajamas and sneak down the staircase slowly, and very skillfully, open the front door so that it would not creak. I would rest my head on the stone floor and play Nirvana out loud on my phone at one, two, three, four, five in the morning, sometimes until the sun came up. I mostly listened to MTV Unplugged in New York, because it was an acoustic performance and that was exactly what I needed to hear. As Kurt sang to me, I would lay there, smoking and shivering, until my body felt less nervous, and the beat of my heart echoed the calm of the music.

Artists never die because the body of work they leave behind is immortal. For this reason, I am lucky that my father was a photographer. He practiced photography for five decades and when he died, I was given bins and bins of these photos. These bins were stored in our basement, alongside garbage bags filled with off-season clothing and timeworn furniture we might find a use for again one day. I viewed these bins as the keys to my father, and I avoided them for many years, afraid of what they might open. 

The morning after we visited The Young Street Bridge, my mom and I drove back to Seattle to a Nirvana exhibit titled, “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses.” That’s where I found myself surrounded by the body of work Kurt Cobain had left behind. The exhibit featured Kurt’s Fender Stratocaster, the casting call flier for the “Smells like Teen Spirit” music video, the sweater Kurt wore for the video, his grotesque comics, the original artwork for “Incesticide,” a Fecal Matter shirt created by him, various paintings, his old Hunter’s cap, his mom’s pink suitcase that he used to use as a drum set, his letters, journal entries, and lyric sheets. I recognized most of these objects from past internet searches and archived footage. 

It is clear that Kurt Cobain wanted to disappear, but I am not sure if he wanted to be forgotten. His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was just months old at the time of his death. Her entire relationship with her father was built on these objects, and their stories. In an interview she once described her dynamic with Kurt as similar to that of a fan. 

As I walked through the halls of memorabilia, I thought of her. She is only four years older than me, a woman now, with blue eyes that make her the spitting image of her father. An article in Rolling Stone states that Frances maintains only a sporadic relationship with the former members of the band. When the members visited her after years had passed since they last saw her, they saw Kurt when they looked at her. “They look at me, and you can see they’re looking at a ghost.”

I too have my father’s eyes. 

I was fourteen when my dad died. I am the youngest of five, and consequently spent the least number of years with him. I am often told that of his children, I am the most like him. I am the one who became committed to the ostensible impossibility of becoming an artist, a writer. When I visit my eldest sister, I always come with copies of my work for her to read. As she makes her way to the end, and lifts her nose from the final page, she looks at me. I am the ghost of my father. 

Down the hall of objects, toward the exit, was a transparent anatomical mannequin with angel wings. The sculpture was originally a plastic model of human anatomy. Kurt attached the wings himself. He made a few of these and used them as stage props for their final tour for their final album, In Utero. Nirvana had an infamous history of destroying their equipment during concerts, and these mannequins were no different. I have read that they were pushed and shoved across the stage ferociously, but in the most sarcastic way possible, in true Nirvana fashion. If you were lucky enough to stand in the audience, when Kurt stood center stage in front of a mannequin, it looked like the wings belonged to him. 

When no one was looking, I pressed my finger and glided it along a waxy feather of an angel wing. I whispered in my mind, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” I loosened my grip and told my mom I was ready to go. 

Nirvana’s final performance was in Munich, Germany on March 1, 1994. Kurt Cobain died a little over a month afterward. I was born in 1997, three years after the fact. I have always resented the fact that I was not lucky enough to live at the same time as him. I used to fantasize about saving him, the way we often do for those we have loved and lost. 

His death was a defining pop cultural moment for his generation. When I ask those who lived through it how it felt, frequently they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out about his passing. His death and the events that unfolded afterward were oversaturated on television screens across the world, with repeated live footage from the streets of Seattle, the crowds that gathered outside of the house in the rain, and Courtney Love crying as she read his final note. One person told me that the next time they remembered being that glued to a TV was September 11, 2001. 

His life became famous for its death. I knew how he died long before I had ever listened to Nirvana. Most of the conversations I have had with others about his music have inevitably transitioned into an ominous discussion about his last days, his custody battles, his drug addiction. So much of this is fueled by the anxieties we were taught about death, especially when death occurs early in life, amplifying our own fears about mortality. 

I recently asked my mom in a text what she remembers from our Washington trip. 

She wrote back, “It was a trip to heal us after your dad died. I thought all the preoccupation with Cobain symbolized your grief over your father. You learned how to say goodbye in a process that focused on someone else who died.” 

When my mom drove me to our last stop on the trip, she came with me. She parked the car then followed me through Viretta Park, the park next to Kurt’s last home. The grass was lush with mud and my combat boots sunk into the ground. I watched a crow check out his reflection in a puddle full of sky and couldn’t help but project my emotions onto its image. I felt fatigued by the sad finality. 

The wooden bench in the center of the park served as a de facto memorial to Kurt’s life in Seattle. It was covered in notes from fans. I read them and tried to find the oldest date, but they were all written fairly recently. I wondered if the city hired someone to repaint it every few months. 

“Do you have a pen?” I asked her. 

She shook her head. 

I ripped a dandelion from the field, placed it at the foot of the bench, and said goodbye.

My mom left her old boyfriend shortly after the trip. She moved on, quickly afterward, to a man with a kind and witty smile named Harry. Harry is the man that my mother married. He came into our lives with a family of his own, and once they were married, they realized we needed a bigger home. 

At nineteen, I didn’t feel ready to let go of my Hudson River town or the house that structured my life. I procrastinated the move and insisted that I was too busy to sort through my old life and confront the belongings of my past. Inwardly, I accused myself of not having the strength to let go. Time management has never been my strong suit, especially in the circumstance of a great transition. My mom, irritated and in a pinch for time, routinely gave me reminders to pack. 

“All my physical possessions can go to hell,” I dramatically told her. 

She rolled her eyes, patiently held her breath, and started to pack my things for me. 

I was plagued by guilt and the image of her placing my collection of books I knew and books I wanted to know into boxes, my leather jackets, and oversized jeans from Goodwill counters into suitcases, and the toys from my youth into garbage bags to donate. 

Eventually I apologized to her, and when I did, she told me, “It isn’t easy for me either.”

The house was a mess when my father was sick. Every afternoon, as my mother got out of work and I got out of school, we drove into Manhattan to visit him at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. We were never home to wash our clothes. Our accumulation of soiled linen, sweaty shirts, and crumbled pants clung together and grew into tiny mountains in our laundry room. We bought more and more clothes because we never had the time to wash them, and our tiny mountains grew taller. When he died, we spent our weekends in laundromats, claiming half of the machines as our own.  

When we came home, with our bins and our bags, we had to decide which articles of clothing of his to keep, and which to get rid of. I never wanted to get rid of any of them. I was unable to view him as dead. How could he come back if he had no clothes? We stored his things in our attic and in our basement so that we never had to make those choices. The big move meant that the time had come for us to make these decisions. 

My father’s photography included photos of the rolling hills of Sonoma Valley, the canals of Amsterdam, the Notre Dame of Paris, the dirty boulevards of New York City, Buddhist monasteries, car shows, his first wife, his second wife, photos of naked women in beds, photos of young people smoking and laughing on couches, Patti Smith singing with her eyes closed and her hand over her heart, Allen Ginsberg leading a crowd at a protest rally, a photo of my father the age that I am now, a photo of my mom in her wedding gown, a photo of my mom pregnant in overalls, a photo of my mom on the hospital bed. I am tucked into her arms. 

At the very back of the bin was a piece of construction paper with stick figures drawn in crayon and the scribbled words, “I love you dad. Happy Father’s Day.” I must have been seven or eight when I gave it to him. I was taken aback, stunned that he held on to it after all these years. I hugged it, I cried, I whispered in my mind, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I asked my mom about the bins the other day. I asked her how it felt when she gave them to me, and why it was so important to her that they are in my possession. 

 “The bins are a journal of how your father thought, what he loved, how he lived, what he deemed as beautiful, ugly, and interesting. They are his eyes, and they articulate his perspective. The layers of all the photos are the unknowable parts of him. They are a puzzle; they are an answer. They are a silent testament to the life he lived, his journey, his adventure, his legacy,” was her response.