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Nearly five weeks later, the fact that Charlie Kirk — the man — is actually gone still feels strikingly surreal.

“A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was snatched away. Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it.”

Those words from C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed — a devastating, raw, unflinchingly human response to the loss of the author’s beloved wife, Joy — took on a new significance after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

With all the cruelty we’ve come to expect of this uncharitable age, unfeeling talking heads, (probably) well-meaning fellow travelers, and insufferable opportunists wasted no time in turning Charlie Kirk’s Death into a Subject to be analyzed like one would discuss the government shutdown or DOGE cuts. The topic itself is already verging on — I hate to say it — rote, dispassionate familiarity — something we all know is tragic more than we feel it.

But nearly five weeks later, the fact that Charlie Kirk — the man — is actually gone still feels strikingly surreal.

Today, on what would have been his 32nd birthday (and what Congress has declared a national day of remembrance for the fallen conservative icon), it’s worth remembering that Charlie Kirk — the husband, father, son, sibling, and friend — is permanently absent from the chair at the head of his family’s table. A three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son haven’t seen their dad in 34 days, and never will. Erika Kirk, now the CEO of her late husband’s organization, will have to raise their kids without him.

That should break our hearts.

It’s customary to say we don’t mourn for Charlie himself because “he’s in a better place.” But maybe that’s the wrong response. Perhaps we should mourn for Charlie, a vocal proponent of getting married and having kids young, who will never get to watch that young family grow up (hence the C. S. Lewis quote).

One can only imagine the many milestones he looked forward to sharing with them — now dashed; the bedtime stories and heartfelt admissions of love — forever unspoken. We linger over these kinds of details not to squeeze gratuitously on our heartstrings, but to remind ourselves that this man we’ve all become so used to talking about was real and, by all accounts, a great man.

Before the shooting, we were all acquainted with Charlie Kirk, the debater. Since his passing, a new Charlie Kirk has come to light: the family man, who never raised his voice at his wife or kids, according to Erika.

As Vice President JD Vance suggested, “Maybe the best way that I can contribute and the best way that I can honor my dear friend [Charlie Kirk] is to be the best husband that I can be, to be the kind of husband to my wife that he was to his.”

God forgive us if we have exploited this man’s memory for cheap sloganeering. In a world where we’ve become accustomed to watching other people’s tragedies unfold on a screen, forgive us for turning their mishaps into our opportunities to go viral.

Politics is all abstract — until it isn’t. In reality, it’s a high-stakes game in which real people get hurt. We must never forget that.

Mourning keeps us human, sensitive. It’s the moment at which tragedies like Charlie Kirk’s death, school shootings, and war cease to move us — cease to break out hearts — that the darkness gets to us.

The world lost a great man — and a family lost a great patriarch — on September 10, 2025. If you’re still processing that fact, if you haven’t reduced it to a mere topic of conversation, good for you. You’re more human than most.

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Created:	2025-10-13 23:00 GMT
Updated:	2025-10-21 07:00 GMT
Published:	2025-10-14 15:00 GMT
Converted:	2025-11-11 12:07 GMT
Change Author:	Jakob Fay
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