There’s a TV screen with my mom’s face on it. It’s hanging in the courthouse in Tralee, behind the coroner for Co Kerry and a French doctor, and she’s crying. She’s also holding up her phone so my late uncle’s widow can hear what’s happening. They are online attendees of my uncle’s inquest. A friend and I are the only people, other than the officials, who are there in person.
My mom made sure I went. Our family is mostly based in Ellensburg, a town a few hours east of Seattle, on the northwestern coast of the United States. She wasn’t sure if hordes of fans would be at the courthouse.
That’s because my uncle was Mark Lanegan, a singer and songwriter. It would have been his birthday today. He was born on November 25th, 1964. He died in Killarney on February 22nd, 2022. Until that day in Tralee we didn’t officially know why or how.
His being in Ireland was, frankly, puzzling. I saw a chance to demystify it a bit. In August 2024, I moved to the island of our forefathers as my wife took up a master’s programme at University College Cork.
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I won’t pretend I wasn’t side-eyeing Mark in the decision to come. That’s because, really, there is no closure. Not to things like this. Eddie Vedder, Moby and other celebrities wrote notes of farewell to him when he died. But for our family it has been a long line of question marks.
Now, my being in Ireland has provided us with answers. Time being a river, it so happened that his inquest arrived more than two years after his death, in the autumn of 2024. A concert in his honour was held in London that December, 10 days after he would have turned 60.
Mark’s inscrutable intimacy is legend. His presence was commanding: at 6ft 4in he cast a tall shadow. Narrow-set eyes and no interest in small talk. Gold-capped teeth and a laugh like a pirate who was, somehow, born at sea. He was sharkishly cool: aloof and stoic with a thrum of dark humour.
I set about knowing him in a deeper way like he described getting into music: by accident, as there seemed to be nothing else to do.
“He’s not going to be able to ride,” Grandpa said. “I’ll go instead.” I was outside an Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. I was six years old. The attendant saw Mark’s arms and stopped him. Fat claws of pink and purple ran up his arm. I remember Mark scowling, walking off.
Uncle Mark was like this through my childhood. He was in and out. His career as a musician made that reasonable enough. It’s not like everyone’s uncles and aunts are recurring characters, à la Full House.
But, more than that, Mark was in our lives when and if he was clean. His most serious vice was heroin, hence his arms. But his proclivities were a maw spanning alcohol, pills and, in his own words, everything else under the sun, too.
My mom missed her only brother. On the same green-and-silver CD player she has had since I was a kid, she played his albums Field Songs and I’ll Take Care of You. His most profitable LPs, with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, never make the rotation. Those are the ones Momski says overlapped with his “disease”.
My penchant for partying and getting wasted collided with a nasty eating disorder when I was 19. I entered treatment at the Eating Recovery Center in Bellevue, in Washington State. Mark hit me up to talk about his time in these spaces. He helped me see the Band-Aid-on-skinned-knee days were over. Recovery is about living in recovery, he said, not waking up one day with a new brain, little brother.
We had a lot to talk about on this topic for some five years. I ball-of-lightninged my way through Seattle, something he pioneered in his grunge heyday with the likes of Kurt Cobain and the Alice in Chains boys. Like him I moved to California.
We’d text all the time at this point, discussing the sun’s power on the brain of an addict from the Pacific Northwest. I self-published a shitty fantasy book. He read it on a plane ride and was wildly enthusiastic. We swapped poems. For me this was just the right relationship at just the right time.
“His cause of death is misadventure,” the coroner read. I chuckled in that too-empty courtroom. After almost 60 years of adventures, it was a misadventure that beat Dark Mark. Mom might have listened in over Zoom, but she couldn’t understand what the coroner meant. It was a complication of his long Covid, I told her.
In 2020 Mark changed. The day Covid shut down the Bay Area, my then girlfriend and I thought we’d drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Looking back, it was dumb, but we just thought we’d be working from home for a spell.
Mark tried to dissuade me from coming. We were still talking a good deal then, and he said it was stupid. I ignored him. Still, we made it there and back safe and sound. When I got home Mark chewed me out.
By spring it was clear that his focus on the Trump administration and its response to the pandemic was so intense that it had become overwhelming. By summer it had escalated.
He had determined that his and his wife’s home in Glendale, just outside LA, was no longer an option. A darkness had shrouded the house. It was final: Mark had come around and said it was imperative I drive his two mini Australian shepherds to my mom’s house. My uncle and his wife were headed to Ireland.
Part pandemic, part politics. Plus they had a friend who’d rent them a place in Killarney – my uncle knew he had a big following in Ireland. They managed visas and were leaving right away. Could you come down now, little brother?
I rented a Kia Sorento and headed south down the I-5. Mark has so much music that there’s a song for everything. I listened to his and Neko Case’s The Curse of the I-5 Corridor, a seven-minute thumper. It felt fitting for this quest, this particular trying to be there.
The last time I saw him alive he was distracted. A group of his friends sat in his garage in a circle. They ushered me in. I talked to a woman about happiness for a while. Mark and his wife said goodbye to their dogs. I don’t remember what we talked about. Everyone was more than a bit scattered. I thought this was the version of him that understands my issues – but understands them a little too well.
Sitting in the stands at the Roundhouse in Camden, in London, red light drenching the huge room, I was overcome. Hearing Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode cover Revival, a tune by the Soulsavers Mark once sang for, was an emotional blast. I cried in blinding bursts. It was a second funeral.
Once the two of them got to Ireland, Mark’s paranoia had boiled to a point that affected his safety. Refusing to get vaccinated, he contracted Covid’s Delta variant. His hospitalisation, at University Hospital Kerry, was intense. He entered the hospital on St Patrick’s Day. The coma spanned almost a month. Nurses were convinced he would die. Momski says his wife was allowed to enter his room only to say goodbye.
Later, the staff told her it was in these farewells that Mark’s vitals improved – a miracle. It was Easter Sunday, Mark’s resurrection. “The nurses said he was the most sick person in the hospital,” my mom remembers, “and that he was on death’s door.”
His rough-hewn body scarred further, this time on the inside. His lungs and oxygen flow never recovered. He wrote a spacey, rambling book about long Covid, Devil in a Coma.
I hadn’t been on a conversational basis with him since that outburst in 2020. Complications of going overseas as an already solitary person might include the eight-hour time difference and yawning physical distance.
[ Mark Lanegan, the self-destructive musical underdog who came ‘home’ to KillarneyOpens in new window ]
One morning at his home in Co Kerry he went downstairs to get something and fell. In the past his colossal frame would have been able to shoulder the impact. Not so after the virus shot him through. Like the rough shantyman he was, he went out to sea and didn’t return. The day I heard he died, I sat in a parking lot and smoked, went to a club that night and drank, lashed out at a kind of friend in a confusing blackout.
There’s no closure.
That goes double for his listeners. There’d been no communication from our family since his death. I met with a group of his fans before the London show. My little brother connected with them on Facebook. The last they heard, Mark had been readying for a tour, then, suddenly, died.
At the meet-up, a woman from the desert told us she’d been running his fan page for decades. Another man said Mark’s albums got him through the worst of his addiction.
I can never know how close I really was to Mark, delineating between fan and nephew. I know I felt close for a few years. He understood my life and, I thought, I understood his. What it is to carry the infinite affliction of wanting too much. To be from the incorrect hometown. To travel to a painfully beautiful island to lay that hurting on the stony shore of the Celtic Sea.
I did just that the day after Christmas, his memorial 21 days in the hole like a 21-gun salute. I looked out at the wind turbines and the blaring sun and thought, Mark would understand this roaring grief.
“Now I see you in our old home, where I’m always scared to go,” he and Case sing on that fateful song. “Is it because you took a shortcut that makes people say you’re crazy? Is it true, you’re a time traveller, you? Is it true? I’ve seen crazy, too. Well, can it be a comfort between us? Because I never want to know for sure.”
Paolo Bicchieri is a writer and journalist
