Here We Are Now (12 page)

There was a point when I was working on
Heavier Than Heaven
when I tried to create a timeline for Kurt's drug addiction, charting out his overdoses and his stints in rehab and pairing them with when he said in interviews he was sober. The math simply did not add up. He'd talk in these interviews about having several weeks free from drugs, but friends told of him consistently using, and police and medical records proved that point. At one point I even called up Courtney Love and posed the question to her. I told her that in the window of the last eighteen months of Kurt's life—when his addiction was most extreme—I simply couldn't find a full week when he was sober, much less the several weeks he kept referring to in progressive interviews with magazines. Courtney's response was one word, but it proved how much I still didn't understand of the depths of Kurt's struggles. “Duh,” she said. And then she continued, “He was an addict. What did you think?” I had wanted—like every biographer who wishes the best for his subject—for the story to have been prettier, for drugs not to have had such a stranglehold over him. At best, I wanted a better life for Kurt, but at worst, I was naïve.

As Kurt's life went on, the addiction became worse and worse. There were more overdoses, suicide attempts, arrests, and all of it going on while he was still the biggest rock star in the world. Anything he did was news then; anything controversial he and Courtney did together was even bigger news. They kept making headlines even though their lives kept getting smaller, caught up in a spiral of addiction where Kurt wouldn't leave the house for days, sometimes weeks.

Many people outside their world wanted to blame Courtney for Kurt's addiction, but even several of Kurt's closest friends who had an intense dislike of Courtney were adamant that this wasn't the case. Two addicts holed together in a nest with money and drugs was never a good situation, but she most certainly did not get him “hooked on drugs” in the first place, as is often believed. Kurt was into heroin well before Courtney's arrival. Kurt's three girlfriends prior to Courtney all told stories about how his experimentation with drugs drove him away from them. And in Kurt's marriage to Courtney, there were a number of times when his behavior was more reprehensible than hers. Courtney went through more periods of sobriety than Kurt, and during one of those she even attended twelve-step meetings. Kurt knew when Courtney was sober, and he often would be in the next room using even though his wife had just come from a meeting of narcotics users trying to stay clean. But in a marriage that included two drug users, it makes little difference which addict was worse or better at any given moment. One of their closest friends put it to me this way: they were like two characters in a play, the perpetrator and the victim, the addict and the nagging spouse, and they switched roles daily, sometimes hourly. Whether she was a good or bad choice as a mate in the eyes of the rest of the world didn't matter to Kurt. Reading their correspondence and his diaries it was clear to me that he picked her just as much as she picked him.

When Kurt died in 1994, his drug use got another, more extensive examination in the court of public opinion. His death was big news and had the effect of scaring straight some of the drug addicts I knew in the Seattle music scene. But it certainly didn't stop drug use, in Seattle or anywhere else. The weekend after Kurt's death, many of Kurt's Seattle friends drank or drugged themselves to oblivion, trying to escape the shock and pain. Kurt and I had mutual friends, and one who had been sober for a few months fell back into the darkness that week. Kurt's death made many who knew him feel hopeless. That particular friend died a few years ago, the final few years of abuse killing him in what was, in a way, a slow suicide. That story was repeated again and again.

Eventually, though, Kurt's tragic death made many in the music industry, particularly treatment professionals and musicians, rethink addiction. Over the years, I've met at least a dozen A-list musicians who told me privately—when the tape recorder was off—that seeing the stark reality of addiction so laid out in Kurt's life made them change their ways. There is a line in twelve-step literature that says the only outcome of untreated addiction is “jails, institutions, and death.” Kurt hit all three, and never was there a life where the ultimate price of addiction was as clearly spelled out. If nothing else, his life has served as a cautionary tale.

“I didn't stop immediately after he died,” one musician told me once. “But seeing what happened to Kurt, I had to look at things. It took a year, but I got help.”

Since Kurt's death, more attention by mental health researchers has been placed on how drug and alcohol abuse are involved with suicide—several studies show that as many as two thirds of suicides involve substance abuse in some form. “Since Kurt's death, treatment for alcohol or drug addiction has changed drastically, as we now are delving into the underlying causes and condition of the entire addictive disease process,” says Erica Krusen of MusiCares. “Once, treatment facilities may have focused primarily on intervention or detox, but they are now learning to assess and identify co-occurring psychiatric conditions, such as major depression and/or anxiety that, left unaddressed, will likely result in repeated relapses or risk for suicide.”

MusiCares is a charitable wing of the organization that gives out the Grammy Awards, and they provide anonymous treatment options for musicians battling addiction. The group has raised millions for treatment through benefit concerts featuring the likes of Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Carole King, and Bruce Springsteen. MusiCares has helped thousands of musicians get treatment and resources to stay sober. It has also helped—anonymously of course—several Seattle musicians who knew Kurt, and a few who even did drugs with him. In the early nineties, some of these resources were not available to musicians, or at least not widely known of.

Harold Owens is the senior director of MusiCares, but he was also previously a counselor in the very drug-treatment clinic Kurt last attended, and worked on the same ward that Kurt was assigned to. Owens says Kurt's death was a “wake-up call” to the music community and made managers and record labels specifically rethink their roles. Even as horrible as Kurt's death was, Owens says many musicians sought treatment because of it, and continue to do so. “A lot of people got sober as a result, maybe not then, but a seed was planted that they could get help,” he told me.

Band managers began to look at addiction on a monetary level, realizing that early death means the end of a business revenue stream and, strictly from a financial standpoint, requires quicker action than previously thought. Drug addiction is now thought of as an occupational hazard. Bands take “sober coaches” on the road, and some bands create no-alcohol zones backstage. At every major festival or music-industry event, private twelve-step groups are organized to provide support; MusiCares hands out business cards listing a toll-free treatment line, and the cards are routinely posted backstage at many venues, or in bathrooms and dressing rooms, so that musicians in need will know where to find help if they seek it.

But the biggest change in the past twenty years is in attitude. “Before the nineties,” Owen says, “there was a myth that there was no way out, that getting sober would also mean losing creativity. But since Kurt's death, a lot of well-known people have gotten sober, and the myths have dissipated.”

Kurt's death even moved some in his family to speak publicly about the impact of addiction and suicide on the family unit. His aunt Beverly Cobain has written two books on preventing and coping with suicide, including
Dying to Be Free: A Healing Guide for Families After a Suicide.
Kurt's favorite and closest aunt, Mari Earle, was also inspired to create a presentation on drug addiction that she gives in high schools. She has talked to thousands of teens. Hearing about Kurt's struggles from one of his closest relatives gives a face to the battle with addiction, making it seem more personal than an episode of
Celebrity Rehab.

There was no
Celebrity Rehab
in Kurt's era. He most certainly would never have gone on that program, as he felt so much shame from both his addiction and his fame. But two decades after his death it seems that celebrities of all ages and levels of fame can take to the airwaves and announce that they are seeking treatment for addiction. As a public, we barely bat an eye now. Tragedies involving drug addiction and suicide continue, but the idea that celebrities can openly discuss their struggles is a given today.

Any fight with addiction is a difficult battle in which success is measured in days clean, and in which the language of recovery speaks of “a daily reprieve” rather than a cure. Four of Kurt's friends I interviewed for
Heavier Than Heaven
have since died of drug-related causes in the last decade. But several other close friends of Kurt's—all horribly addicted at one point, one severely enough that I thought his body was the one that had been discovered at Kurt's home—remain sober.

It feels awful to even write these words, but Kurt is better known now for his suicide than for anything else. Even those who know nothing about Nirvana, or music, or Kurt's personal artistry know he took his own life in April 1994 with a shotgun. He is one of the most famous people to ever commit suicide. Any search for suicide on the Internet immediately yields Kurt's name near the top, along with Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Kurt's suicide made front-page news around the world, made the cover of many magazines (
Newsweek
's headline read:
SUICIDE: WHY DO PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES?
), was reported on every major television news broadcast, was the subject of round-the-clock coverage on MTV, and was the topic of days of discussions on talk radio. “Kurt became synonymous with suicide,” says therapist Nicole Jon Carroll. For a time his suicide so dominated public thought it “removed him from the brilliance of his artistry,” she says. Carroll would know firsthand: in addition to being a noted therapist, she was Kurt's sister-in-law.

Kurt's suicide affected the lives of his family and his fans, but it was not a unique story—except for the fact that he was famous. That same year, in 1994, 30,574 other people killed themselves in the United States. Suicide has become such a public health issue that combating it is now the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as if it were the plague or the Ebola virus. The CDC estimates that for every actual suicide there are eleven unsuccessful attempts, meaning that in the year of Kurt's death, several hundred thousand Americans tried to take their own lives. Worldwide, the numbers are in the millions.

Even those closest to Kurt, and who suffered the greatest loss, realized his death was one of many. “It's not uncommon what happened with Kurt,” Krist Novoselic told me once. “The same story happens all over this country every day. It's a combination of drug abuse and lack of coping skills.”

The Washington State Youth Suicide Prevention Plan, which was instituted the year after Kurt's death, identifies the major risk factors for suicide. They read like Kurt's résumé: previous suicide attempt (Kurt made at least half a dozen attempts); past or current psychiatric disorder (like depression); alcohol and/or drug abuse (severe for Kurt); access to firearms (Kurt had many weapons). One other risk factor not on that list, but that experts agree plays a role, is a family history of suicide. There is much thought in scientific circles that researchers will find a “suicide gene.” A 2002 study published in the academic journal
Archives of General Psychiatry
found that children whose parents had attempted suicide were six times more likely to attempt suicide themselves. Some of the public discourse on this was reignited in 2009 when Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and one of her two children in the house when she committed suicide, took his own life at forty-seven.

Kurt's family history of suicide was significant. Two of his uncles took their own lives, and his great-grandfather committed suicide in front of his family. There was also a family history of depression and alcohol abuse, and many in the field feel there is a strong genetic component to depression and addiction. Researchers continue to look for a suicide gene, but what is known is that certain regions have significantly higher suicide rates. Social scientists think that when suicide is common in one area, and this greatest of all human taboos is crossed, it gives vulnerable people “permission” when a period of suicidal thought hits. In Kurt's case, he had so much suicide in his family and in his hometown, he was already talking about taking his own life as a young teen. Kurt came upon a suicide victim himself when he was in middle school, discovering a man who had hanged himself in a tree. That vision was most certainly indelible in Kurt's young brain—he extensively talked about it with his childhood friends—and the sheer happenstance of that discovery became yet another horrific part of his history.

I often see things written along the lines of “Kurt Cobain killed himself because of fame.” Maybe. But consider that before Kurt ever picked up a guitar he had seen a suicide victim hanging from a tree, he had family members on both sides of his lineage who had chosen suicide, he had family histories of depression and alcohol abuse, and he grew up in an economically depressed area where unemployment and suicide rates were high. It is possible that before he ever picked up a guitar, he didn't have a chance. It is possible that fame, rather than taking his life, perhaps gave him more years than he would have had without it. What we do know for certain is that growing up knowing other family members have committed suicide, as was the case for Kurt, increases risk significantly.

The sad story of suicide in our society has continued since Kurt's death. In the two decades since, suicide rates in the United States have steadily increased, according the CDC. In 2010, 38,354 people committed suicide in the US. Thirty-three percent tested positive for alcohol, 23 percent for antidepressants, and 20 percent for opiates. In a given year in America, suicide results in an estimated $34.6 billion in medical costs and work lost. Though young females attempt suicide at a greater rate than men, more men die from suicide since they are more likely to be successful in their attempt—what suicide researchers called the gender paradox. Young men are particularly vulnerable, and according to Suicide.org there are four male deaths by suicide for every female suicide death. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adults of either gender twenty-seven years of age, after only car accidents. Kurt turned twenty-seven in February 1994.