Seventeen years ago today, at least according to the Seattle coroner, Kurt Cobain – Father, Husband, and frontman for the 90s rock band Nirvana – put a Remington 20 gauge shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger, ending his short life.

Three days passed before his body was found, on April 8th, 1994. Three days. I thought about that today and it gave me a strange sort of jolt. This man was hugely famous, an icon, a star — but he laid dead in his home in a pool of blood for three full days before, finally, an electrician installing security lighting at his house inadvertently discovered his body. The man said that at first he’d thought Cobain was sleeping. Then he saw the shotgun.

I first heard Nirvana’s music back in 1989. A girlfriend of mine at the time brought Bleach over to my parents’ house, and we sat in my teenage bedroom on the bed and listened to it. My friend practically vibrated with excitement over the record, and I could tell that she expected me to feel similarly. But it was the year after I’d graduated from High School, and I was adrift – not excited about much of anything. And though the music and lyrics fit the tone of my life at the time nicely, I didn’t think much of the record as a whole, honestly.

A couple of years later, in the late summer of 1991, my best friend John – who happened to be a music and arts critic – got an advanced release copy of Nevermind from Sub Pop. I was visiting him in Detroit at the time, staying for a few days in the apartment he was sharing with some friends downtown.  One afternoon John had to go out and run a couple of errands without me, and so he suggested that I spend some time listening to his recent acquisitions while he was gone, saying we’d talk about them when he returned. On his way out the door he’d pointed almost accusingly at the watery-blue cover of the album, arched his eyebrow and said, in a knowing tone, “That? Is going to be HUGE.” It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. But I put it on the stereo, sat down, and listened.

When John returned a few hours later, I pointed to the cover as he had before he’d left, one shaking finger repeatedly beating the air, and could think of nothing to say, except, “Holy crap.”

By the time In Utero came out I was in college, writing for my small liberal arts school’s newspaper. I wrote a review of it for the paper, calling the album “their most powerful, most emotionally complex work to date.” And also, “a very long, very beautiful suicide note.” It was both.

Today, on the way back from picking my kid up from school, I put Nirvana’s Unplugged CD on the car’s stereo. My chest ached as I listened, just ached. It ached for the man, for his plain humanity, for his obvious loneliness and sadness, for his beauty and his fragility, and for that single, desperate choice he made. I was three years younger than him, but in 1994 my life felt like it had just started, like everything – anything – was still possible. I look back now and know that was true. I was just a kid then, really. He was, too.

At the climax of the Unplugged recording of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” there’s a small moment where the music recedes into silence, and Cobain exhales and then takes a breath… You probably know precisely the moment I’m talking about. There’s something profoundly resonant about it, about that moment and that exhalation, and its haunted me for years. In the video of the performance, it’s jarring and unmistakeable, and ultimately, indelible:

I’ve spent years thinking about that single exhaled sigh, and the look in Cobain’s eyes after. There’s a whole lifetime’s worth of defeat and anguish and despair burned into those few seconds that is still shattering to see, so powerful that it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up all these seventeen years later. That kind of pain seems outsized for someone so beautiful, so talented, so young. And it is.

I hope if there is any kind of peace in the hereafter, he’s found it there.