Kurt Cobain’s daughter marks the 30th anniversary of his death with a loving tribute

When Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994, Frances Bean — his old child with wife Courtney Love — was still in diapers. On the 30th anniversary of the Nirvana lead’s passing, she looks back on a life spent without him in a loving tribute posted to Instagram, writing, “I wish I could’ve known my dad.”

Sharing several photos of herself as a baby on their last days together before his passing, as well as a few of her dad when he was just a young boy, she remembers how Kurt’s mom, Wendy, would often press her hands to her cheeks and say, with a lulling sadness, “you have his hands,” breathing them in as if it were her only chance to hold him just a little bit closer.

“In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing,” she writes. “The biggest lesson learned through grieving for almost as long as I’ve been conscious, is that it serves a purpose. The duality of life and death, pain and joy, yin and yang, need to exist along side each other or none of this would have any meaning.”

Pondering the impermanent nature of human existence, she goes on to write, “I wish I knew the cadence of his voice, how he liked his coffee or the way it felt to be tucked in after a bedtime story.” Ending with the last line of a letter her dad wrote to her before she was born, which reads, “Wherever you go or wherever I go, I will always be with you.”