I don’t know. I just really fucking do not know.
You see the “1978-2020” under his name on a billboard or included as part of a post on social media and it’s just like, “Man … what the fuck?” You see the pictures of all the flowers that have been left for him outside Staples, or you see the waste basket memorials, or you see the “REMEMBERING KOBE” tag during an NBA game on TNT, or you see a clip of someone saying something about him through sneak-attack tears, and it’s just like, “… Jesus Christ. Is this real? Has this really happened? Are we really doing all this right now?”
Kobe Bryant is dead.
What a stupid sentence.
What a miserable, terrifying, heartbreaking, complicated, stupid fucking sentence.
I found out what had happened the same way that many of you all did: on the internet, in bits and pieces, quickly and sloppily, and then all at once. My wife and kids and I were getting ready to go over to my parents’ house for a Sunday barbecue, and there was a tiny stretch of time when nobody in my house needed me to do anything or answer any questions, and so I took my phone out of my pocket. I unlocked it and then tapped the little Twitter app avatar with my thumb and there it was, a stream of unclear-but-worried tweets about Kobe, and about a helicopter, and about a potential tragedy, all mushing themselves together into something truly ugly. I refreshed and I refreshed and I refreshed, until finally—a few minutes later or a few hours later, I don’t know—there it was: proper confirmation. Kobe Bryant, one of the two or three most omnipresent figures of my lifetime, was dead; he and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna were two of nine people killed in a helicopter crash.
It didn’t seem real then. It didn’t even seem real on Tuesday night, watching Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry West, Rick Fox, Derek Fisher, and several others tenderly and emotionally eulogize him on television from half court at Staples Center.
Or, I don’t know.
Maybe it does feel real?
Maybe it feels extremely real?
Maybe that’s what’s going on?
Maybe that’s where this ache is coming from?
I don’t know. I just really fucking do not know.
Draymond Green also spoke about Kobe on Tuesday night, in a press scrum separate from the Staples Center ceremony. While doing so, he waded into some of the very deep, very cold, very awful gunk that I suspect many of us have found ourselves lost in: What those final moments must’ve been like for Kobe and Gianna, what Kobe must’ve been feeling. Draymond said he was sure that, despite facing a sudden and truly catastrophic doom, Kobe knew that his job in that moment was to shield his daughter from it in whatever way he could, and to reassure her that things were going to be fine even though he knew better; to hold her, and to love her, and to squeeze her, and to, in the most devastating of circumstances, make her feel just the tiniest, teeniest bit safer one final time. “That crushes me,” Green said, his words soaked with pain and insight, “because I understand it … from … just being a father.”
There are a lot of different pathways into conversations about Kobe—Jemele Hill wrote beautifully about the arc of championing others that Kobe seemed to actively pursue in the years following an argument the two had about Trayvon Martin; Jeremy Gordon wrote masterfully about how Kobe’s basketball mythos converges with his 2003 rape case, and how both of those things are true but only one can ever be mentioned first; Howard Beck wrote brilliantly about the human side of Kobe’s basketball genius; and Ella Ceron wrote powerfully about finding no easy answers while grappling with her Kobe fandom while also being a survivor of assault. I hope that, in the coming days, I will make my way through versions of each of those insights, as well as a few others that are out there. But right now, and ever since the accident, all I’ve been able to think about is what Draymond Green has been thinking about.
This past July, my family and I were on a flight to Florida. At some point during that flight, my youngest son realized we were 30,000 feet in the air, and when he did, he went into a tiny bit of a panic. He was suddenly worried about a number of things, the most pressing of which being that there was a possibility the plane could fall from the sky. When he brought up his concern, I told him not to worry; that I had it under control; that I would protect him; that I would make sure that he would be safe and his mother would be safe and his brothers would be safe.
“How,” he asked, and I could tell from his voice that he needed an answer more substantive than “I just will,” which is usually how that conversation goes. So I started talking.
It was mostly just nonsense—the plan, which I was making up as I spoke, eventually involved me ripping the cushions off of multiple seats, tying them to him and his brothers and his mother, and then tossing the four of them out of the plane at “a body of water or something soft like a pillow factory” before we hit the ground—but it worked. He was satisfied, and he was calmed, and he was soothed. And I felt like I’d done my job as his dad. But this is the dumbest part of the whole thing: After a few minutes, I started to talk myself into the idea, too. Like, I really thought that in some kind of airplane crisis, if everything broke my way, that stupid shit might actually work. I sat there confidently. “I’ll save us,” I thought to myself, envisioning wrapping my family in airplane seat cushions like a total fucking idiot.
After you have children, you come to find out that that sort of thing is baked into your Parent DNA. You convince yourself that, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of how hopeless whatever pretend situation you’ve cast yourself into might be, you will always find a way to protect your children. You really and honestly and truly believe that. You feel it all the way down in your fucking chromosomes. You know it to be true. You ABSOLUTELY know it to be true.
But it’s not.
We’re all at the mercy of the universe, or God, or fate, or chance, or whatever. And there’s nothing to be done about it. That’s what has been sitting in the back of my brain since Sunday. Because if something as catastrophic as that helicopter crash can happen to somebody as immensely undeniable as Kobe Bryant, then what chance do any of the rest of us have?
And what’s more: Kobe Bryant was only three years older than I am right now. And before Sunday, I had a very clear map in my head of what the future was going to look like for me and for my family. My parents, both of whom are 56, were going to live for another two or three decades, and then they’d pass peacefully. And then all of my uncles and aunts would too. And then it would be time for me to stand in line and wait for my turn, and for my wife’s turn, and for each of my three sisters’ turns, and for all of my cousins’ turns. There might’ve been a tiny bit of jockeying for position among all of us who are five or six years apart in age, but mostly there was a template in place. It’s that same template I imagine Kobe felt in his spirit when he would proudly talk about being able to watch Gianna become a basketball superstar. You build this familial architecture into your existence and it makes so much sense to you that it becomes unquestionable, and infallible.
Death arrives by generation, I’ve told myself. They go and then we go, I’ve told myself. That’s the order, I’ve told myself. That’s how it’s going to go because that’s how it’s supposed to go, I’ve told myself.
But no. That’s not true either.
I think you allow yourself to believe that—to believe that there’s structure— because it provides you with a certain amount of peace, the same way you allow yourself to believe that you’ll always keep your children safe. And when those things get shaken—when something happens to wobble those set pieces in your head—it’s terrifying.
I figure enough time will pass that hopefully I’ll be able to build back up all of those walls and defense systems again; that I’ll be able to lie to myself thoroughly enough to keep those insecurities buried.
But I don’t know.
I just really fucking do not know.
The only thing I do know is this has given me reason to be more active in my expressions of affection and love toward the people that I care about. At least there’s that.