So, women are pathetic when we cry. But when we don’t even smudge our mascara after an unimaginable tragedy, we are heartless, fickle and not to be trusted.
When we lose a young husband in a terrible, violent fashion, is there a right way to grieve, one that everyone will be happy with?
Should a widow dress head to toe in black, like Queen Victoria upon the premature death of Prince Albert? Retreat from life and happiness, forever?
We look at the footage of the assassination of John F Kennedy and admonish Jackie for trying to climb out of the open limousine. But if we ever experienced a sudden act of violence, who knows how we might behave?
Being rational, worrying about the optics does not – unlike the bullet that killed the American president – enter the brain. People often laugh at funerals and wakes, after all. We’ve all done it. There is no ‘right’ way to navigate pain.
But I have been watching the appearances of Erika Kirk, the 36-year-old widow of the late Right-wing activist and broadcaster Charlie, 31, who founded the conservative student organisation Turning Point USA. And her level of glossy composure is admirable, but also puzzling to me.
Charlie, father to their young children, was assassinated in September by a shooter while addressing an audience on the campus of Utah Valley University. During her speech at her late husband’s memorial service at Glendale, Arizona, just 11 days after his murder, her hair and make-up were immaculate.
A manicured hand, heavy with jewellery, occasionally dabbed her nose with a hanky but her eyes were not rimmed with red: instead, they were icy blue. She used notes, glancing up at her audience in a measured way that would be more at home accepting an Oscar.
Erika Kirk’s level of glossy composure is admirable, but also puzzling to me, writes Liz Jones
US President Donald Trump plants a kiss on the cheek of Erika, the widow of Right-wing activist and broadcaster Charlie Kirk
Earlier this month Erika, dressed in skin-tight leather trousers, hugged Vice President JD Vance at a Turning Point event, prompting online speculation that he was going to leave his wife for her
Perhaps she was simply suffering from a type of shock unimaginable to the rest of us, on some kind of autopilot.
Earlier this month, Erika conducted her first TV interview since her husband’s death. In a glossy sit-down with Fox News, she recounted how she had insisted, against advice, on seeing her husband’s body in the hospital morgue: ‘I responded back to [a police officer]… “I want to see what they did to my husband, and I want to give him a kiss, because I didn’t get to give him a kiss this morning.”‘
She stated that he looked as though he had died happy, with a ‘Mona Lisa-like half smile’.
Erika is now in charge of Turning Point, as well as anchoring her late husband’s podcast, because she wants to ‘continue his life’s work’. This is despite her old-fashioned views on the role of women, having advocated in the past the revival of ‘biblical’ womanhood, and of ‘submitting’ to her husband. She declared: ‘You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.’
Okay, so no longer a Stepford wife. It’s confusing.
A former college basketball player and pageant queen, Erika met her future husband when he interviewed her for a job. They married in 2021. Raised a Catholic, she is deeply religious, hosts her own devotional podcast and even owns a ‘Christian clothing line’, whatever that is. Sackcloth, perhaps.
In a recent interview, she stated that she did not want her husband’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, 22, to face the death sentence, saying: ‘My husband, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life. That man, that young man – I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do.’
At her late husband’s memorial or, as some have called it, the ‘Maga wake’, held in a massive stadium extravaganza in Arizona attended by nearly 100,000 people, the scene was reminiscent of a rock concert. After President Trump gave a speech, proclaiming Charlie a martyr, he was joined on stage by Erika, whom he hugged. He proclaimed that flags at the White House, all public buildings, military posts and naval stations and vessels be flown at half-mast.
Earlier this month, at a Turning Point event, Erika, dressed in skin-tight leather trousers, engaged in another emotional hug, this time with Vice President JD Vance, prompting distasteful online speculation, clearly unfounded, that he was going to leave his wife for her. Online observers point out that in Trump’s America, Vance’s Hindu wife Usha could be regarded as something of an electoral liability. Cruel, doctored images subsequently appeared online, depicting Erika as a ‘fake grieving widow grifter’. Can women no longer hug men without an undercurrent of betrayal?
Erika says she believes, and has assured her children, that her husband is now in heaven. Of course that must be a huge comfort, perhaps the reason she is able to get up each day, breathe in and out, like grieving widower Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, until after a while she won’t have to remind herself to breathe in and out.
But still, the Martha Stewart perfectionism, the false lashes, the baring of Marie Osmond teeth in a chuckle at that memorial seemed oddly unreal to me.
Erika has addressed the swirling criticism online, writing on Instagram: ‘There is no linear blueprint for grief. One day you’re collapsed on the floor crying out the name Jesus… the next you’re playing with your children… feeling a rush of something you can only attempt to define as divinely planted and bittersweet joy as a smile breaks through your face… this magnitude of suffering didn’t steal my love for my husband. It amplified it. It crystallised it.’
I don’t know, perhaps Erika really is made of steel. Perhaps her faith sustains her. Frankly? It all feels a little off.
