The Hardest Grief: Empathy for the Families of Infamous Men
Condemning the politics while mourning the innocents left behind.
There is no easy way to write this. The news of Charlie Kirk’s death has already begun to split the country into two warring funerals. One side lights candles and calls for martyrdom of a new saint. The other side, more or less quietly, celebrate, arguing that the world is better off without Kirk. Both are missing something essential: the unbearable weight of the people who knew him not as a public brand, but privately, as a son, a husband, a father.
How can we navigate the minefield of feeling (?), demanding (?) empathy for an infamous figure like Kirk who died violently while advocating for gun rights and publicly ridiculing empathy himself. On one hand, millions will feel only schadenfreude—relief that a voice of division has gone silent. On the other, the faithful will rush to turn his death into a parable of sacrifice, perhaps even a battle hymn. But in the shadows of both reactions are the families, left with the impossible work of mourning a man who belonged not just to them, but to the brutal theatre of this American public life. Kirk is survived by his wife Erika Frantzve, whom he married in 2021, his three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son.
The Ambivalence of Empathy
To feel for Kirk’s family is to wrestle with ambivalence. We can condemn what he stood for and still acknowledge the innocent suffering of those left behind. That tension—between justice and mercy, rage and compassion—creates a psychic dissonance. It is easier, in fact, to dehumanize everyone connected to him, to write the story cleanly: villain dies, curtain falls. But families are stubborn facts. They remind us that even the most polarizing actors have human circles who never signed up for the show. But then again questions arise, who are the “innocents” left?
The parents? Did they form his racist worldview? Are they innocent?
The wife? Erika Frantzve, the former Miss Arizona accepted the life of a tradwife of a young man who made a lot of money peddling hate and division. Charlie’s shocking death sees him leave behind a fortune. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Kirk had a net worth of $12 million at the time of his death. Just recently Kirk accepted an offer of $5.25 million on his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The children? Here, there is no ambivalence - every normal human being empathizes with the fate of Kirk’s three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. We do not choose our parents… We instinctively feel for them.
The Humanization of the Unchosen
When Nazis mythologized Horst Wessel after his 1930 death, they didn’t care about his mother’s grief. They cared about the utility of her grief. They scrubbed away her private loss and turned her son into a national sacrament. What’s happening now is more subtle, but the risk is the same: to transform Kirk’s death into a political relic, while erasing the ordinary pain of those who simply lost a loved one.
Empathy toward the family resists that erasure. It insists that children are not guilty of fathers, that grief does not belong to parties or campaigns. It prevents us from collapsing into the fascist logic of collective blame.
The Fatigue of Holding Two Truths
But empathy comes at a cost. To care for the innocent survivors of infamous men is to invite empathy fatigue. How do you hold compassion for the widow while remembering the damage her husband helped cause? Is she an innocent victim? As a tradwife she supported him and benefited from his fortune. How do you honor her tears without forgetting the harm his words inflicted on millions of strangers? This is moral distress in its rawest form, the difficulty of remaining human in a world that rewards caricature.
The Call to Compassionate Justice
Charlie Kirk is gone. What remains is the contest over his memory. Trump and his allies will try to sanctify him. Some on the left will want to dance on his grave. Neither honors the deeper truth: that the dead leave behind real people, with real wounds, who deserve neither our hatred nor our exploitation.
Still, the effort matters. Empathy for families differentiates between the guilty and the innocent. It reminds us that justice must not metastasize into vengeance.
Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.
Barbara Deming