"And so we ordered champagne, 'cause Pat [Smear] was with us for a little while, and Kurt doesn't drink, and then we put Frances to bed. And we started making out, and we fell asleep. He must have woken up and started writing me a letter about how he felt rejected. But I'm not sure I believe that because he wasn't rejected. We both fell asleep. Anyway, I woke up at, like, four in the morning to reach for him, basically to go fuck him, 'cause I hadn't seen him in so long. And he wasn't there. And I always get alarmed when Kurt's not there, 'cause I figure he's in the corner somewhere, doing something bad. And he's on the floor, and he's dead. There's blood coming out of his nostril. And he's fully dressed. He's in a corduroy coat, and he's got 1,000 American dollars clutched in one hand, which was gray, and a note in the other. It was on hotel stationery, and he's talking about how I'm not in love with him anymore, and he can't go through another divorce [referring to his parents]. And then the next page is like how we're destined to be together, and how he knows how much I love him, and please don't take this personally, and how Dr. Baker [a senior psychotherapist at Canyon Ranch, a health and wellness resort the couple attended] said that like Hamlet, he had to choose life or death, and that he's choosing death."

After Kurt came out of the coma and the two of you flew back to Seattle, how did you approach the subject of his suicide attempt with him? "I just held his ass. I just held him. I felt like I really needed to show him that I loved him and, you know, 'please stop this.' I may seem quite flip and everything now, but I was not flip then. I was catatonic. I really was over the edge. And there was a third person involved here. It wasn't just between me and Kurt. It was me and Kurt and Frances." Love nods toward the bedroom door. "See those marks on the door. On the wall. That's from when he was in here with guns, and I kicked it in. Or tried to. It was too secure. He finally just unlocked it. And there were the guns, out. And I grabbed one. This was March 18. I grabbed the revolver, and I put it to my head, and I said, 'I'm going to pull this right now. I cannot see you die. I can't see you die again.' He grabbed my hand. He was screaming, 'There's no safety. You don't understand, there's no safety on that. It's going to go off. It's going to go off.' So he got it from me. And I was seriously going to blow my head off right in front of him, because I could not deal with it. I didn't find this out till later, but he had called from the ICU in Rome and had arranged for a gram of heroin to be delivered in the bushes of our house. It was fucking five or six days after Rome, and he was high as a kite."

Love recognized that Cobain was destined to take his own life. "How could I not when he talked about it every single day? If there were 99 dots on the wall, he was going to kill himself. If such and such happened that day, he was going to kill himself." Kurt's mother, Wendy O'Connor, knew what lay in store for her son: "I said if he ever lived to be 30, I'd be surprised." Love harbors deep regrets over a number of incidents during Cobain's last month, particularly her involvement with a March 25 intervention. "I flipped out because he absolutely was crazy. Out of his tree. I was desperate. So I called an intervention. And then they wouldn't even let me stick around. They had a Lear jet waiting for me. I never got to kiss Kurt goodbye, or even say goodbye to him." Later, with Love checked in to the Peninsula of Beverly Hills hotel, Cobain tried to reach his wife one last time. "It was on April 2. There was a block on the phone for everyone but him. I did not sleep. I called the operator every couple of hours to make sure, in case they changed shifts. They all knew that if Mr. Cobain called, put that fucking call through to me. 8:54 a.m. I was not asleep. He called, and for six minutes he tried to get through, and could not. For him to argue for six minutes on the phone is crazed. I cannot imagine him arguing for six minutes. He did, though. And what that told him is that I was on their side, that I had a block on the phone for him. And I did not. Kurt's whole plan was to try and wear everyone down, but he could never wear me down. I think, though, that at that very moment he thought I had given up on him." A spokesperson for the Peninsula denies that the incident took place.

Despite her pained account of Cobain's demise, Love is committed to making certain that their life together be portrayed with dimension, and not as some dope-crazed cartoon. "People don't give Kurt enough credit for how hard he tried to kick," she says. "All they want to talk about is how much drugs he and I did. That is not all we did. We had a life. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We rented movies, and ate ice cream. We would read out loud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity. "He was not stupid at all. And nobody fucking believed that one either. They just thought he was this dumb idiot songwriter. He was smarter than me. He didn't read as much, but like that whole Civil War PBS series--I got him that for Christmas because we got charged so much for the rental--he would just watch it over and over again. We even spoke about going back to college here. "And we would spend at least two hours every day with Frances. That was definitely a rule. He was way better about it than me, actually. I was a little lazier. He'd get up as soon as she awoke and spend most of the day with her. "I have home video footage I want the world to see, just 30 seconds or a minute of Kurt at home so they can see how fucking funny he was, and how utterly earnest he was. He was one of the most earnest people in the world. Really, really sincere. He made Winnie the Pooh look insincere."

Love, who readily admits to a sexually active past, discovered with Cobain that fidelity could be a turn-on. "Kurt looked upon time and marriage as an aphrodisiac. He looked upon stability as arousing. And he really cured me of my former cheating problem. Because my cheating problem had always been based on power. You know, like, 'fuck you' power. And Kurt never played those games at all."

In the aftermath of Cobain's death, rumors have swirled around the nature of Love's relationships with Michael Stipe and Trent Reznor. "My friendship with Michael is really complicated and strange," says Love. "I'm halfway in love with him. Kurt was halfway in love with him. Together, we were in love with him in this sort of nonsexual, romantic, and worshipful way. He's the only celebrity I've ever met in my entire life where it's a little bit difficult because I'm a such a major fan. When I hang out with Michael, I hear 'Radio Free Europe' in my head. "Michael's been absolutely supportive of me. He's really been my friend. His perception of me, though, is fairly distorted; he loves me, but he believes a lot of the hyperbole about me, and that really gets to me. I know he has great respect for my music, but he thinks I love the drama and the starmaking bullshit a lot more than I do."

A ten-day tour opening for Nine Inch Nails and a subsequent romance with Reznor left a vulnerable Love with a bitter taste in her mouth. "My relationship with Trent was a minor or major disaster, depending on your perspective. I really liked him a lot as a friend, and I was surprised to find out we had so much in common. What angers me the most, though, is that I think at some point he probably sat down and said, 'What does this do for my image?' He is that image-oriented, even though I pretended that element didn't exist. I was in full denial. I thought he would have a lot of problems like Kurt, but that I could fix them. Like his silver Porsche, like having to prove to himself that he's a rock star. I thought these were erratic little problems, and I could smooth them over, and make him perfect. Because he really does have a large IQ and he really is sensitive. And I can't think of another male except for my husband who writes lyrics in such a feminine, graphic way. I saw a lot of cool things in Trent, but I was also projecting a lot of Kurt onto him. The whole thing was just too soon after Kurt, ultimately, and I really regret it."

In better order are Love's relations with Nirvana band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. "I'd describe them as slightly tense, but good," Love says. "Our intentions toward each other are all really positive. There's not some horrible Yoko nightmare going on, and hopefully there never will be. I totally respect Krist's feelings for Kurt and the way he's handled himself since Kurt's death. One thing that Kurt told me a long time ago, and he made it very very clear, was that no matter what mood he was in with Krist, he and Krist had the exact same taste in music."

One possible point of contention arose when Novoselic caught wind of Love's plans for the public mourning space for Cobain in Seattle's U district. "Krist was kind of adamant about there not being a place for people to go. He wasn't into me putting Kurt in a public cemetery. And it was just this whole thing all over again, of Kurt saying to Krist, 'Put yourself in my shoes. Look at what I have to fucking go through.' And if they don't have a place to go, you know where they'll end up? My house. "Sometimes I'll go over to the park that's right next door, where all these kids come to hang out and gawk and try to jump my fence. Once in a a while I'll talk to them, and some turn out to be decent people that really don't have any other place to go. They need to go somewhere, and I understand that. My friend Joe Cole [murdered on December 19, 1991, while with Henry Rollins], his remains are up at Forest Lawn, and I go there. I hang out and I talk to him sometimes. I don't know who hears it or how it works, but it's important that all that life energy be somewhere." One source of Love's strength in the face of such tragedy stems from her faith in Tibetan Buddhism, which she recently discovered after years of practicing Nichiren Buddhism (best known by its Nam-myoho-renge-kyo chant). "Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying has a detailed description of what happens when you die, and how you can help a dead person. That's what was really important to me: having control over the destiny of Kurt in terms of his spirit, where he was, and where he's destined to be." Love, whose piety waned some when she met Cobain--"I just thought I had everything that I wanted, and I didn't need to chant anymore"--chastises herself for her spiritual laziness. "I'll tell you this right now--period, guaranteed, end of story--if I had not stopped chanting, Kurt would still be here."

Two longtime friends also played key roles in the healing process. Warner Bros. Chairman/CEO Danny Goldberg, who formerly managed Nirvana, "was extremely important to Kurt. He was the only person in the industry that Kurt could really talk to. If I ever get married again, Danny's absolutely the prototype." And Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, who first met Love in 1989, spoke with her nearly every day between May and September. "Billy kept me alive," she says bluntly.

Ten months have passed since Love suffered the loss of her spouse, and slowly--very, very slowly--the life that lies ahead gains ground on the one left behind. Her daughter, her career, her will, all work in tandem keeping her head above water. But when Love references the infamous September 1992 Vanity Fair article (the story accused Love of using heroin while pregnant with Frances, a charge she categorically denies), her undying affection for Cobain, and her fear for her own future, become excruciatingly clear. As Love recalls her despair from the article's fallout, she just as well could be delivering an elegy for her life during, and after, Kurt Cobain.

"Imagine this: You're peaking. You're in your youth. At the prime of your life. The last thing you want to be is a symbol for heroin use. You've finally met somebody of the opposite gender who you can write with. That's never happened before in your life. The only other person you could ever write with wasn't as good a writer as you, and this person's a better writer than you. And you're in love, you have a best friend, you have a soul-fucking-mate, and you can't even believe it's happening in your lifetime. And as a bonus he's beautiful. And he's rich. And he's a hot rock star to boot. And he's the best fuck that ever walked. And he wants to have babies, and what you want is babies. You've wanted to have babies forever. And he understands everything you say. And he completes your sentences. And he's lazy, but he is spiritual, and he's not embarrassed about praying, he's not embarrassed about chanting, he's not embarrassed about God, Jesus, none of it. He fucking thinks it's all really cool. He wants to fucking learn the path. He wants to be enlightened. Everything. And there's even room for you to fix him, which you like, 'cause you're a fixer-upper. He's perfect in almost every fucking way. The only fucking happiness that I ever had.

"And then it all gets taken away..."

In Vancouver, Hole closes its set with a new song, as yet untitled. The chorus is sad and tender: "He said I'll never ever ever go away / He said I'll always always always stay." Toward the song's end, the volume dramatically increases, and Love's voice grows harsh, defiant, challenging. The song's final words are left hanging in the air: "Now you decide."