Kurt – Tuesday 25th July 2023

I spent a lot of years looking for someone, a little like me. Someone dealing with those things I couldn’t articulate, yet I knew if I saw such a person, I would recognise them.
I only saw just a single person and he was a public person. He was playing guitar, left handed and singing as well. This in itself was quite something (guitar and singing). Just the guitar on its own was surprising, I had tried and couldn’t, so he was doing something really quite special. He was playing and singing and doing it in sequences, patterns. Which is how i have to do things, in order to do them.

I couldn’t explain why (at that time) but here was someone having to do something, the same way and its really difficult to have to work that way, so naturally he became quite important to me.

So time passed and though he was angry, I knew he was actually the opposite and the anger was due to what and how he felt, being so sensitive too and not understanding its source. So he was angry at family and others, because he didnt know he was without filters. Slightest things likely hit him like a train.
It was my fourth husband who said to me, “you have no filters”.
And I gave this thought and realised it was basically accurate. Why didnt I?
And again, I saw this too in the young man. He must have been searching for answers all the while, just as I had.

And then he was gone. And I was devastated. And I knew his family and friends knew him better than I, but I knew they didn’t know what I knew.

I’ve never spoken about this to anyone, the actual issues I recognised in him, but was thinking on them just recently when recalling my experience that resulted from a ‘drum pedal’. (Which is quite another story itself.)

Very soon after Kurt’s passing, my son Sean began to regress and then another journey commenced. Initially finding Autism then finally finding Rett Syndrome.
Though we aren’t typical, we do have this Syndrome and I spent years studying genetics, which actually isn’t easy for my disability but persisted within my learning capability and discovering the type of error that we would have in the gene involved with Rett Syndrome and much more.

Did Kurt have a Rett disorder? Possibly, though he was more able than disabled. I read he received an ADD diagnosis when young, but he definitely had more than that going on for him. What he was able to do while here was actually astounding. I do so wish he could have somehow coped, till he could manage his difficulties. They so angered him and tied him and yet he still determined to create musically. Because I could see this and more about him, it was easy to disregard those things that people judged him about, without fully knowing what he was dealing with. He was such a special person and all the while fighting a most difficult and unseen, complex disability.
Whether he had an issue in the Rett gene, only analysis could determine. However, his hands were unmistakable to me. I strongly suspect that he carried and partially expressed the gene involved for auburn hair. And this, for him, was very, very harmful.
Fiona MacLeod (C)