It’s Sept. 11, 2025 — the day after my husband, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed.
The past 24 hours feel like a fever dream as I land in Phoenix from Utah and return home. I get out of the car, and my kids run into my arms. They have no idea where I was or what I was doing. They care only that I am home.
As I walk to the front door, there’s a tightening in my chest I don’t recognize. Is this what grief feels like? I sit on the couch where Charlie sat two nights ago watching the Cubs with our kids. I feel a wave building inside me, and I know it’s about to crash.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” I told the second lady, Usha Vance, earlier that day. As she held my hand, she said: “You know when you’re on an airplane with your kids, and you’re going to land in 15 minutes, but the kids are going crazy, screaming, throwing things, and then the plane lands, and the kids relax, and everything is fine again? That’s how it will be. Just get through the next 15 minutes.”
Her words are seared into my heart.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to go into our bathroom. I stared at his side of the sink. His toothbrush was still lying on its side, his towel still hanging on the hook. “I’ll never touch that towel,” I told myself.
I stood in the doorway of our bedroom. I turned on the light and walked toward his side of the bed. I stared at his pillow and wondered how long a person’s scent can last in sheets. I stood there in silence, replaying all of the completely ordinary mornings we woke up there together. I wasn’t ready to be there, so I turned off the light and crawled into bed with my 3-year-old daughter. Just get through the next 15 minutes.
For months, I avoided my bedroom. I told myself it was OK to confront the pain gradually and to sit with each memory as it came to me.
The first Saturday without a love note from him passed. His 32nd birthday. My birthday. Thanksgiving. When I put the Christmas tree together wrong, it made me realize that being a widow means old traditions will need to make room for new ones. The wave crashes on me again and again. Every time, just get through the next 15 minutes.
Easter, our wedding anniversary, our son’s second birthday, the preliminary hearing for the man accused of murdering my husband, our annual trip to Maine, now as a family of three. Then the last of them, our daughter’s fourth birthday.
Another wave came as we sang “Happy Birthday” to her. As I sang through it, tears streamed down my face. I hugged my daughter as she blew out her candle. I wished he could’ve seen her. She held my arm and kissed me, and in that moment I realized that she was surviving her own little crashing waves, too.
Grief is strange. Time continues even when every part of you wants it to pause or, better yet, rewind. But the people we love who have passed on would not want us to spend the rest of our lives trying to rewind. At first, I needed to survive the next 15 minutes. Over time, I’ve realized that Charlie would want me to live them.
Occasionally, I’m asked whether I’m angry at God. I say no. My husband was one of one. I was blessed to be his wife, and I understood his assignment here on Earth, which he more than fulfilled. He wanted people who felt lost to know the everlasting hope he found through faith and the sense of meaning and purpose that can fill the deeper longings we so often try to satisfy elsewhere. To the world, he was Charlie Kirk. But to me, he was the love of my life. To our children, he was the center of their world.
When you lose someone you love, it’s easy to struggle to understand God’s plan. One of the hardest tests of our faith occurs when bad things happen.
True faith means accepting that we won’t get every answer and finding peace in that.
I have seen extraordinary good born out of something unimaginably evil. I have watched people return to faith in droves, reconcile with their families and forgive old wounds because of Charlie. I know my husband is in heaven, but I ache for him to be here. Still, I can stand and say without a shadow of a doubt that God is good.
The wave still comes, but it’s different now. A year ago, when I felt it coming over me, I wondered whether it would swallow me completely. Now, I recognize it; sometimes I even welcome it, because for a moment the grief makes Charlie feel impossibly close.
Grief is universal. It doesn’t care whom you voted for, where you come from or what you believe. Those who have walked through grief know that the waves never completely disappear; they aren’t supposed to. I am learning that grieving Charlie and living life at the same time are part of the rhythm of grief. I can miss him with every part of me and still laugh with our children. I can have a broken heart and still experience joy.
If you are living through grief, I won’t tell you what to feel or that tomorrow will be better than today. I will tell you what a dear friend told me: Just get through the next 15 minutes.
One day, maybe when you least expect it, you’ll start to see that those 15 minutes hold more than just grief. The grief is there, always, but so is the beautiful gift of life.
Erika Kirk is the chief executive of Turning Point USA.
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