My dad introduced me to Nirvana, had taped Nevermind opposite U2's Achtung, Baby and I listened to it constantly. It was music completely new to me, as it was to all the others who were discovering them. I didn't tell anyone what I was listening to, except for Angela. At school, I pretended to enjoy the musical stylings of SWV and En Vogue, but at home and with her, we were all about the rock.

It wasn't until my freshman year in HS that I stopped caring what others thought of my choice in music and, by that point, Kurt was already dead.

It's been ten years and one day since he got high enough to kill himself and then did the job with a shotgun alone with no one to talk to, thinking heaven knows what. I know that Courtney kept a chip of his skull, his long blond hair still attached. Was it love that motivated her to do such a thing or was it just a souvenir of what she had and lost?

Kurt allowed us as a generation to express our fears of the future, to stop smiling through gritted teeth, to stop taking one for the team and to actually let people know that yes, we're young, some of us in pain, and we don't like it. Life isn't some idyllic painting and we won't allow things to continue in such a vein.

It pains me to think of little Frances, however little she may not be anymore, having to live with the legacy of what her father did, people remembering his exit and not his stay, living with a mother who just can't look past her own selfishness to do right by her daughter. What will she grow up to be like? Will she transcend the grisly history and be a productive, artistic person? Or will she give in to her surroundings and fall so far as to be unrecoverable? I want to think that she will do the latter, that she will take on the least dark attributes of her parentage.

I was shaken yesterday, listening to the recently resurrected WMAD's 24 hour tribute to what Kurt was. Chills ran down my spine, raising hairs on my arms when they played snippets of interviews with the band, when they replayed Dan Rather's announcement that he was dead. It made me think of "Rocked By Rape" and whether Kurt ever thought about the day when Dan would speak of him in such tones, announcing to an older generation that the younger's star had just gone out, our way of navigation possibly lost. I don't know why they chose the anniversary of his death; it strikes me as macabre and not altogether fitting.

Four years ago, I met a boy who turned out to love Nirvana, who has every CD but the ones in which Kurt's addiction had progressed to epic proportions. He hates Unplugged because Kurt was so high, he hates the video for "Come As You Are" because he knows that it was filmed in such a way as to hide Kurt's appearance. His encyclopedic knowledge of Kurt's music is amazing and I will never know nearly as much as he does, but I can still read, I can still listen to the Outcesticide collections, and I can still wish that he were still here while knowing at the same time that his pain is gone, however selfishly he made that happen. I wonder if he knows how much more pain he caused in the long run.

I feel so selfish wallowing in the sadness of a decade ago, wishing that 1 man were still walking the planet, while 10 years ago today, 300,000 Rwandans were killed and countless others maimed, raped, infected, and left haunted for the rest of their lives. Kurt's death wasn't genocide, but I mourn him because it's what I know. Music was the driving force for me as a 13 year old, not foreign affairs and the goings-on of countries I had hardly given a thought to.