By 13, he’d begun smoking weed, and six years later, he had his first taste of heroin. As the ’80s turned to the ’90s, it was a full-blown addiction.

Around the same time, he met Love, a woman with her own admitted set of troubles. (For the record, she seemingly responded to the report surrounding his death by posting a Feb. 9 Instagram photo of herself reading Flamingo Estate’s The Guide to Becoming Alive.) 

A “Sid and Nancy” of sorts for the grunge era, albeit with a different type of tragic conclusion than that toxic rock couple, Cobain and Love tied the knot in 1992. Their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born six months later.

“I always knew their relationship was toxic,” Frances Bean told Rolling Stone in 2015, referring to the couple’s early bond over drugs. “And I don’t promote having a fix-it baby, which is what I was—to fix their problems…In the sense that their own families were so chaotic, that they wanted to create their own family as soon as possible: ‘If we create our own family, it will be nothing like our families were.'”

Instead, added the now-34-year-old, who welcomed son Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk with husband Riley Hawk in 2024, “It ended up being a million more times chaotic.”