Erika Kirk has opened up about the crushing first hours and months after her husband Charlie Kirk was gunned down at a Utah speaking engagement.
Erika, who shared two young children with the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder, described the initial day after the shooting as a “fever dream” in the outlet essay published as the one-year mark of his death approaches. Charlie Kirk was fatally shot by a rooftop sniper on September 10, while addressing a crowd at Utah Valley University, a killing that was captured on video and rapidly spread across social media platforms.
The following day, Erika flew back to Phoenix, Arizona, to reunite with her children, who had not yet been told what happened to their father. She settled onto the same sofa where the family had watched the Chicago Cubs together just two nights before with Charlie still alive. That was when the first “wave” of grief hit her.
In the bathroom, she found his toothbrush still sitting where he had left it. His towel hung on its hook, which she swore she would never move. Inside their bedroom, she stared at his pillow and wondered how long a person’s scent lingers on bedsheets. She could not bring herself to sleep in their bed, retreating instead to her three-year-old daughter’s room. She avoided the bedroom entirely for months afterward.
“The wave crashes on me again and again,” she wrote.
Each passing milestone delivered fresh blows. Birthdays, holidays, annual traditions, Christmas — all arrived without Charlie. Their daughter’s fourth birthday proved the most recent and piercing. Erika broke down as the family sang “Happy Birthday.”
“I hugged my daughter as she blew out my candle,” she recalled. “I wished he could’ve seen her. She held my arm and kissed me, and in that moment I realised that she was surviving her own little crashing waves, too.”
Erika also disclosed a conversation with second lady Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance, that took place earlier on the day she returned to Phoenix. Erika had confessed she did not know how she would endure what lay ahead. Vance took her hand and offered a metaphor drawn from air travel with children:
“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,” Vance continued. “Just get through the next 15 minutes.”
Erika later passed that advice to others walking through similar darkness. “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.”
Over time, Erika said she recognized she needed more than survival. She began to understand that the waves of grief, while unending, could also draw Charlie near. “For a moment the grief makes Charlie feel impossibly close,” she wrote. She described finding a rhythm where mourning and living coexist: “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.”
Charlie Kirk’s killing became one of the most shocking political assassinations in recent American history when a sniper opened fire on him during a public appearance at the Utah Valley University campus in Orem. The shooting was recorded and distributed widely online within minutes. Tyler Robinson, the man charged in the attack, pleaded not guilty on September 2 to aggravated murder and six additional offenses; prosecutors have since been cleared to pursue the death penalty at his upcoming trial.