Born to an average American couple, Kurt Cobain was a unicorn, his clueless parents sadly ill-equipped to love and nurture him. Passed around to various relatives like a piece of luggage, it's no wonder a deep rooted, emotional pain seared his soul. As I watched the history of his life unfold on film, my thoughts commanded: "No one should be allowed to treat a child that way."
Kurt's artistic talent and sensitivities were a mystery to those around him. His upbringing akin to torture, by the time he mastered his dual passions of writing and music, he was so far off the rails emotionally there would be no righting the ship. Had Cobain been born into a family of higher mind - recognizing and nourishing his gifts - his story would have realized a very different and much later ending. As the saying goes: "if a child has one person in his world who loves him and gives a sincere shit about him, he will survive." The absence of this person in Kurt's life paved the way for his isolation, drug addiction and mental illness and inevitable death by his own hand.
We live in a barbaric world. Striving to love and take care of each other every day is the hallmark of a civilized society. If you don't attend to and care about each other, the rest doesn't mean much. At the age of 14, Kurt laid down on railroad tracks in his hometown of Aberdeen, WA, with concrete blocks on his appendages attempting to end his life. However, he picked the wrong tracks and the expected train stormed past on parallel tracks.
His whole life Kurt hurtled toward a cliff of self destruction. And yet, director Brett Morgen still managed a rant during the Q and A after the second public screening, blaming Courtney Love for his suicide. Certainly a flash mob of guilty parties all through his life cumulatively contributed to his demise. In the end, he chose to end his pain by his own hand. We are each other's keepers, and love holds amazing curative powers, but each of us has to find the strength, within ourselves and the universe, to carry on.
