I was scrolling Instagram and came across a post Frances Bean Cobain wrote about grieving her dad. It was especially poignant because I just finished the book Demon Copperhead yesterday. If you read it, you’ll know what I mean.

One of the things Frances mentions is that Kurt loved Strawberry Nesquick.

This instantly brought me back to my childhood home, standing at the counter, using a spoon to pop the round metal top of the Nesquick box and shoveling huge tablespoons of the pink powder into a tall glass of milk.My favorite part was all the wet pink muck at the bottom that I’d eat after chugging the milk.

Sometimes Teara and I would skip the milk and just eat spoonfuls of the powder. We’d sneak into the kitchen when Lol wasn’t around. It wasn’t very hard to creep around in a carpeted kitchen (it was the 80s, we also had an avocado-colored refrigerator.)

We’d also occasionally climb on the counter to reach the box of brown sugar Lol thought she was hiding from us in the upper cabinet. We would break off huge chunks and chow down and get a sugar rush.

In my twenties I worked with a friend who had a crush on a guy in our office. The attraction itself was befuddling to me because he was this older, married, pale, paunchy guy, and she was smoking hot. Before you start thinking “HOME WRECKER!”, stop. Nothing ever happened. He never even knew.

Her pining came to an immediate halt the day she was in the cafeteria and saw him order chocolate milk.

Sometimes I surprise myself with the things that turn me off, but I’ve never stopped liking someone because of their beverage choice.

I had to question her on this. “Wait, so you don’t like him anymore because he drinks chocolate milk?” Her response, “I can’t respect a grown man who drinks chocolate milk.”

And that was the end of that.

For 30+ years the story of Kurt Cobain has been predominantly tragic. Even his happier music takes on a tone of despair.

To know he was a guy whose favorite drink was strawberry Nesquick… it’s so normal and humanizing – and somehow makes it all the more sad.