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“If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you,” bellows Courtney Love on her seminal track “Asking for It” from her 1994 album: Live Through This. 

In July of 1994, three months after Kurt Cobain shot himself in their Washington home, Love journeyed to Ithaca with what was left of her husband—inside a teddy bear knapsack, wrapped in her wedding dress—to have his cremated remains blessed by the monks at the Namgyal Monastery.  

Both of them were semi-practicing Buddhists, so after his death Love got in contact with the monks at Namgyal—known nationally as the North American base of the Dalai Lama. They spent many weeks consecrating his ashes in a process that mixes them with clay before being molded into cones or “tsatsas” while Love acquainted herself with the town. 

Ithaca is home to many rich historical and cultural contributions. Vladimir Nabokov rode the TCAT bus to get the teenage vernacular right for Lolita. L. Frank Baum may or may not have been inspired by Cornell’s long gone yellow brick roads for his Oz books. And a whole parade of public figures from Carl Sagan to Ruth Bader Ginsberg walked up and down these streets as they began their adult lives. 

It seems only fitting that a rock legend came to an end here too. And yet, the mythical story of Love’s month-long visit has almost vanished from the town narrative, despite its place as a supremely “Ithaca story.”

Any record of her experience is resigned to whispers from locals, and a single article published in Esquire magazine by Freeville native and syndicated columnist Amy Dickinson called “Kurt Cobain’s Final Tour.” The nearly 3,000-word chronicle of the experience serves as the only semi-historical recording of the Holesinger’s venture to town.

“No one had reported on it,” Dickinson said when asked about her initial attraction to the story. “People were too cool to think it was amazing. Others just genuinely wanted to respect her privacy. What I’m getting at is that there was no one as shameless as I who was willing to wade in and tell the story.”

Dickinson first heard about the tale through her sister, whose hairdresser had rented out her house on Cayuga Lake to Love, only to find upon her return that the house had been “totally trashed.” She described cigarette butts, and glasses and bottles everywhere. 

Ithacans who have stuck around and haven’t gone off along with Love are full of stories like this that often paint her with the bad-girl image the public has come to know. There’s talk of fits being thrown in former downtown businesses that have since been eaten up by the Commons, as well as bits of the ashes being accidentally inhaled by Ithaca airport security.

What Love left behind in Ithaca, besides the cigarettes and the local stories, is a glimpse into the woman that was so often mis-marketed as a purveyor of destruction. The grunge movement mixed with the peacefulness of Buddhism came to a head on North Aurora Street in an eccentric moment in Ithaca history.

Miss World

While there is no data about the percentage of Americans who agree that Love had a hand in Cobain’s early demise; her name has long become synonymous with Nirvana and is often derided in comparison to the late-great front man. 

When asked the question: “Who is Courtney Love to you?” I received two common answers. The first was “Didn’t she kill Kurt Cobain?” and the second was “She’s a mess, right?”

Born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco to a feminist psychotherapist, and a Grateful Dead groupie—who would later cash in on his daughter’s success by penning two books pinning Cobain’s death on his daughter—Love was emancipated from her family at age 16, when she began bopping around the country and following punk rock bands in addition to working as a stripper. 

After a minor role in the biopic Sid & Nancy, she began putting together a band called Hole, which would eventually become the feminist grunge blueprint. Their 1991 debut album, Pretty on The Inside, became a sleeper hit and secured her place as both a rock n’ roll star and a complicated public figure. 

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The inside of the Namgyal Monastery where Kurt Cobain's ashes sat for months. (Photo by Casey Martin)

At the time of her arrival in Ithaca, in addition to mourning the loss of her husband, she was also living in the wake of the release of the acclaimed album, Live Through This, which came out four days after the death of Kurt. She was in and out of tabloids and it was impossible not to have some vague idea of who the “dirtiest blonde in rock” was. 

Losang Chogyen (a.k.a. Pema) was the Buddhist monk who first met with Love in New York City to discuss options for Kurt’s ashes. He was quoted in Dickinson’s article as saying “She was smoking constantly. She said she really tried to quit smoking, but she’d stop and start again…and the first thing I did right after we met was light her cigarette.”

“She was really interested in what happens when people die.”

On June 16, 1994, Kristen Pfaff, the bassist for Hole died of a heroin overdose. This shadow of double loss caused Love to lay low, avoiding the public eye for a bit. Doug Robinson, an Ithaca native, was working at Ithaca Guitar Works during the summer of 1994 when he described a run-in with the ethereal Love.

“She spent a couple hours in the store trying out different guitars,” he said. “In one moment she said she was tired and just laid down on a display of Fender amplifiers. She wasn’t particularly concerned that she was giving us a frontal display because her dress was very short and she showed us all what color her underpants were, which made me blush, but she didn’t care.”

Dickinson’s article talks of similar instances of Courtney giving in to her exhaustion around town, even during the Buddhist prayer sessions that she participated in at the monastery.

 "She would fall asleep in the dining room, on the floor, she would sleep really soundly,” said Palden Choedak, the English translator for Namgyal at the time of the article’s publication. “And even though it's not necessarily appropriate, it's okay. When she was sitting with the monks, she was like a baby. She was open. She was really there. But when she was taking a telephone call, she was like a different person. She had a chaotic thing going on, and it is so powerful, it keeps coming back." 

In Robinson’s story, he talks of Love getting into a fight with her manager over the store phone, as she paced around the room, stretching the curled cord out and having an animated discussion about wanting her money to pay for the mint green 1930’s arch top guitar. 

“She was not what I would call friendly,” Robinson said. “I don’t remember her really making eye contact with me. But she had a purpose: looking for a guitar and she got one. There wasn’t really anything particularly noteworthy at all.”  

“They (the monks) dealt with her with this incredible amount of compassion, which was beautiful,” Dickinson said. “I mean, she went to the right place...”

Celebrity Skin

Love left Ithaca towards the end of July. She took with her an assortment of shopping items that she bought around town and left behind “about two handfuls” of Cobain’s ashes to be blessed by the monks. 

On August 26, 1994, she kicked off the first performance of the Live Through This tour, an endeavor that would span multiple continents and continue for over a year.  

Current Ithaca resident Billy Coté is a member of the alternative rock band, Madder Rose, who opened for Hole during part of the tour. 

“No matter what state she was in, she was really good onstage,” Coté said. “She was volatile, and she wasn’t always happy about things going on around her, but she was a professional and a musician. She wasn’t just this figure of outrage.”

Despite varied reviews, two arrests, and several lawsuits, the tour went down as a legendary experience with one critic describing Love as: “verging on the heroic.”

“She came up as an indie musician before she was a big celebrity, so she treated us like peers,” Coté said. “She was obviously in a lot of pain and I think she’s a very insecure person—and needy as many of us are. She had a hard shell, but a soft center and you could see that in her eyes sometimes that she just…she didn’t know what to do. 

Coté talked of running into moments on tour where Nirvana would come on the radio when Love was around and it would cause the other people in the room to stiffen.

“And she’d just diffuse it by commenting on the song and say that ‘Oh, Kurt thought this was his magnum opus’ or something,” Coté said. “So in terms of how she handled it in public, she normalized it. But if you asked her what was going on inside her, I can’t imagine.”

Dickinson grappled with the lack of dignity seemingly expressed by Love in her article. At times mentioning photos of her kissing new men and stories of her acting childish in public at a time where her identity as a woman in rock and as a grieving widow were at odds with each other. 

“I think post-Britney Spears’ public breakdown, people would have had much more compassion towards her,” she said when describing her newfound view of Love. “I felt much worse for Kurt than I did for Courtney. And now I realize she didn’t have anybody with her. As someone who has experienced a lot of loss in life, I know that I wouldn’t want somebody chronicling my behavior.” 

Doll Parts

In August of 1994, after Love had come and gone, a woodworker by the name of Henry Robertson came to Namgyal to deliver a throne he had designed for the Dalai Lama, when he was approached by Gerri Jones, the late administrator of the monastery with a special request.

“He told me that Courtney Love had been here the week before with Kurt’s ashes in a teddy bear backpack and that she had been talking about having a stupa built,” said Robertson, who now resides in California where he is the owner of Henry’s Olives.  

While Robertson was not a fan of either of their music, he agreed to do the project and over the course of the next three years, he designed an elaborate shrine that would serve as a home for the tsastas that contained Kurt’s ashes. 

Along with one of the monks from Namgyal, he participated in a secret ceremony with Love held in Kurt’s hometown of Aberdeen, WA where the stupa was filled with incense, the tsatsas, hundreds of rolled-up prayers, and many of Kurt’s worldly possessions including a few CD’s and a can of mandarin oranges. It was then sealed permanently. 

“I have no idea where it sits right now,” Robertson said, “but that was on purpose so there wouldn’t be a throng of well-wishers.”

While the exact location of the shrine is lost—although it can be assumed that Love has it in her possession—the tsatsas of Kurt sat at Namgyal for years until Love sent someone to retrieve them for a ceremony that was held several years after the events in Ithaca. 

“After she left, we realized that she had put out a cigarette butt in an ashtray that was in the corner of the store,” Robinson said recalling his interaction with Love at the guitar store, located in DeWitt Mall. “And she was wearing purple lipstick that rubbed off on it, so that butt became a little item that we would mention occasionally.”

Dickinson also talks about the fabled cigarette butt with the purple lipstick in her article, but much like the town of Ithaca, things have continued to change in the 26 years since Love touched down here. When you ask the new salespeople at the downtown music supply store, you are met with confused looks or the occasional gripe about Love’s legitimacy as a musician. 

While the ashes are no longer here, what she has left behind are stories that are reflective of the culture and make up the town like bricks.  

“I think she would have been huge anyway,” Dickinson said when asked about the age old argument of Kurt vs. Courtney. “She just seemed to move through life in that way. This is somebody who has been through it, but has this real drive for fame. And these days if she’s sober she’s winning.” 

In the absence of Kurt and the minor stop in our town on the roadmap of her life, Love has continued on. She has had no choice, but to live through this.

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