Not Every Death Is Mourned The Same

Charlie Kirk is dead. The news broke the way it always does now: a headline on a feed, a hundred memes before the obituary even hit print. Some mourned him as a patriot, a defender of “values.” Others mocked, sneered, or celebrated. His death revealed a fracture in how we understand who deserves compassion.

We are told death is the great equaliser, that everyone ends up in the same ground, beneath the same sky. But grief doesn’t function that way. Not every death carries the same weight, and not every absence is treated as a loss.

For those of us who lived under the shadow of Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric—queer people, immigrants, anyone he made it his mission to belittle or erase—grief is not straightforward. His death doesn’t feel like an equaliser. It feels like a reminder: that death is political because life is political, and some lives are contested until their very last breath.

As a queer Nigerian, I know what it feels like to move through a world where my life itself is seen as disposable. In Nigeria, the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act doesn’t just criminalize relationships; it criminalizes existence. To “seem” queer can be enough to invite harassment, arrest, or worse. If I died tomorrow, the story told about me might not be that I was a daughter, a writer, a friend. It might be that I was a sinner. A criminal. An example. And my death might be used to justify even more violence against others like me. That is the danger of living in a society that politicizes identity: death is never neutral. And neither is grief.

So when someone like Charlie Kirk dies; a man who used his platform to mock queer kids, attack immigrants, and spread lies about entire communities; what does it mean to mourn?

Kirk’s career was built on turning hate into a brand. He did not just speak; he organized. He didn’t just argue; he mobilized. His words shaped laws, policies, and the permission structures that made life more dangerous for people like me. And yet, at the news of his death, I saw calls to be kind, to be respectful, to “not speak ill of the dead.” I even saw Nigerian politicians and pastors invoking him as a man of God, a warrior for morality, proof that Christian “family values” are global. They eulogised him with the same passion they use to denounce queer lives at home. This is not mourning; it is mythmaking. It is the sanctification of a man whose rhetoric left real scars.

I come from a country where scarcity is constant: scarcity of food, of electricity, of opportunity. But this is something worse: a scarcity of imagination. Scarcity of compassion. Scarcity of a moral vocabulary that sees beyond punishment. There’s no more rice at home, and apparently no more language for grace either; only recycled sermons that turn men like Kirk into saints while damning the rest of us.

When leaders like Kirk die, the demand is not for honesty but for politeness. “Respect the family,” people say. “Don’t celebrate.” But what about the families broken by his politics? What about the young queer kid who listened to him rail against their existence and wondered if living was worth it? Respect should not be demanded where it was never given.

I don’t believe in celebrating death, but I don’t believe in lying either. When someone who spent their life denying compassion dies, we do not owe them compassion. We owe the truth. For some, that truth is anger. For others, it is relief. For many, it is silence. All of those are legitimate.

I think about my own father’s death; a man who loved loudly, who made joy a habit, whose absence is still an ache in my bones. When he died, the grief was heavy, but it was clean. He had given love, and so he left love behind. Charlie Kirk did not leave love behind for us. He left harm. And so the grief is fractured, complicated, contested.

And then there is the phrase I heard too often: “I didn’t agree with everything he said, but…” It is easy to blur the edges of his cruelty in death, to soften the rhetoric into “controversial opinions.” But words are not harmless. They shape laws, movements, violence. To say you agreed with some of it is to admit you agreed with harm.

Charlie Kirk’s death is not just about him. It is about what his absence exposes in us. It forces us to confront the hierarchy we build around grief. Some deaths are national tragedies. Some are footnotes. Some are mocked. Some are erased. And often, the dividing line is not the value of the life itself, but the politics attached to it. Internationally, this lesson is sharp. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 threatens queer people with death sentences. In Ghana, advocacy itself is criminalized. In Nigeria, queerness is still an imprisonable offense. In these places, when queer people die, the state often shrugs. Or worse: it celebrates. Meanwhile, when a political figure dies—even one who fought to deny rights and dignity to others—we are urged to show respect. It is this imbalance that makes Kirk’s death so complicated. For many, his passing is not the loss of a life but the end of a campaign against theirs.

So how do we respond?

We tell the truth. We do not have to gloat. We do not have to mourn. But we do have to be honest about what his life meant; and what his death does not undo. Some grieve. Some breathe easier. Some do both at once. That is not cruelty; it is survival.

The truth is this: death does not absolve us of accountability. It magnifies it. Charlie Kirk is gone, but the damage he helped legitimize is not. The queer kid still afraid to walk home from school in Texas is not safer. The Nigerian girl still hiding her love is not freer. His death changes nothing for them. That is why not every death is mourned the same.

Because love without honesty is performance, and queer people, immigrants, the marginalised—we have performed long enough. So no, I will not celebrate. But I will not lie. Charlie Kirk’s death reminds us that the real question is not “How do we grieve him?” The real question is:

Who else will be mourned, and who will never be mourned at all?

- JJE