The ways to go about remembering Kobe Bryant have been as endless as the dimensions to him that could be remembered.
There were 24-second shot clock violations for the NBA’s most iconic No. 24. There were pre-game videos and heartfelt notes scribbled on shoes.
Murals and makeshift memorials dotted street corners, bodies were engraved with fresh ink. NBA All-Star weekend — in its ceremonies; in how the game’s fourth quarter played out; in how Kawhi Leonard, winner of the first-ever Kobe Bryant All-Star MVP award, shared the moment with his daughter — acted as a multi-day ode to one of basketball’s most polarizing stars. LeBron James shouldered the weight of finding words for not just his own grief, but an entire city’s.
“I want to continue along with my teammates to continue his legacy,” James said before the Los Angeles Lakers’ first home game after the tragedy. “Not only for this year but for as long as we can play the game of basketball that we love because that’s what Kobe Bryant would want. So in the words of Kobe Bryant, Mamba out. But in the words of us, not forgotten.”
And there were countless others, too — some public, some private — all of them an attempt at coming to terms with this new reality. Each of those remembrances were, in their own ways, touching and necessary, devastating and beautiful. When measured against the life Bryant led, though, none of them seemed like quite enough.
Perhaps nothing could. Perhaps a little bit more will always feel needed. Because it was never going to be short or simple, reckoning with a life that held all the multitudes of Bryant’s.
Monday’s Celebration of Life for Kobe and Gianna held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles ended the first near-month of mourning — a period closing off a long, sad sentence.
But from its opening moments, it also made clear that there will be — that there must be — a next sentence, too. Because the lasting way to honour those we’ve loved and lost is how we continue to live.
The day opened with Beyonce. Dressed in Lakers gold, she belted a glowing rendition of her song, XO, whose first verse begins with a tone-setting “your love is bright as ever, even in the shadows.”
“I’m here because I love Kobe,” Beyonce said. “And this was one of his favourite songs. So I want to start that over, but I want us to do it all together. And I want you to sing it so loud that he can hear your love.”
Then it was Jimmy Kimmel’s turn, urging those in attendance to take a moment to speak with the person sitting next to them, to be grateful — even for just a moment — that we’re all here at this same moment.
For each of them, there was applause. But when Vanessa Bryant, Kobe’s wife and Gianna’s mother, took to centre stage, the applause turned to thunderous ovation. She took a moment to gather herself and summon a strength, sensitivity and courage she never should have had to find out she had, eulogizing both her daughter and soulmate in front of the world.
She spoke of Gianna’s laugh and Kobe’s love for romance. She remembered Gianna being confident, but not in an arrogant way, and offering to help the boy’s basketball team learn the triangle offence. She remembered how Kobe would worry about her if she was late to his games, how he would ask security where she was, and how she would tell him he wasn’t going to drop 81 points in the first 10 minutes of the game.
And she lamented the moments lost — that she’d never be able to tell Gianna she looked gorgeous on her wedding day; that she and Kobe wouldn’t get to one day be the fun grandparents, like they used to joke about being.
“God knew they couldn’t be on this Earth without each other, he had to bring them home to heaven together,” Vanessa said with her closing words. “Babe, you take care of our Gigi. I’ve got [Natalia, Bianka and Capri]. We’re still the best team. … May you both rest in peace, and have fun in heaven. Until we meet again one day. We love you both, and miss you, forever and always.”
Millions of people around the world felt like Kobe was, in at least some small way, theirs. But he and Vanessa built an everyday life together. These being her first public comments since the tragedy is no small thing. In the midst of her profound grief, she chose to find words to try to help those millions move forward, too.
And as she stepped off the stage, Michael Jordan delivered perhaps the most important assist of his life, offering her a hand as he held back his own tears.
None of the words that followed Vanessa’s were less candid or less heart-wrenching. WNBA legend Diana Taurasi, who grew up in California and who was dubbed the “White Mamba” by Kobe himself, spoke about her relationship with the Bryants.
“Kobe’s willingness to do the hard work and make the sacrifice every single day inspired me and resonated with the city of Los Angeles,” Taurasi said. “We struggled together. We grew together. We celebrated victories together. The same passion we all recognized in Kobe, obviously Gigi inherited.
“Her skill was undeniable at an early age. I mean, who has a turn-around fade-away jumper at 11? LeBron’s barely got it today.”
The laughter the line brought was welcome, a reminder that even on the saddest days there can be reasons found to smile wide. And if Taurasi’s words were the reminder, then NCAA star Sabrina Ionescu cemented the message with absolute clarity.
Ionescu grew up watching Kobe play. She recalled seeing the intensity she felt mirrored in him, and later in Gianna, too, when they worked out together over the summer. And as time went on, Ionescu and Kobe would exchange texts. Even now, Ionescu sends them.
“I still text him even though he’s not here,” she said. “‘Thank you for everything. The rest is for you. Rest easy, my guy.’ The last one I sent him said ‘I miss you, may you rest in peace, my dear friend.’ The texts go through but no response. It still feels like he’s there, on the other end. That the next time I pick up my phone he would have hit me back. Sometimes, I find myself still waiting.
The week after the accident, Ionescu was in Colorado for a game. Like she does before each of them, she prayed. But this time she was thinking about Kobe and Gianna.
“His voice is still in my head even if his body is not on this earth. And all I wanted was a sign that in some way, he still heard me too. I looked off into the sky and there it was, a beautiful golden sunset — the boldest yellow, Lakers yellow — and further in the distance, a helicopter. There was my sign that he will be forever with me.”
No remembrance of the life Bryant lived could be complete, though, without the icon he spent his career chasing and the partner who defined his career’s first chapters.
Jordan, his eyes as red as one would expect them to be on a day like this, stepped to the stage and reminisced on his profound love for Kobe, for his passion and his steadfast determination to pick Jordan’s brain for advice.
“Maybe it surprised people that Kobe and I were very close friends, but we were very close friends,” Jordan said. “Kobe was my dear friend. He was like a little brother. Everyone always wanted to talk about the comparisons between he and I. I just wanted to talk about Kobe.”
Part of having his brain picked meant late-night phone calls to talk about post-up moves, footwork and sometimes Phil Jackson’s triangle offence. In the beginning, the calls were an aggravation. But over time, and with a better understanding of why Kobe kept calling, the calls grew on him.
“This kid had passion like you would never know,” he said. “And it’s an amazing thing about passion. If you love something, if you have a strong passion for something, you would go to extremes to try to understand or try to get it.
“What Kobe Bryant was to me was the inspiration that someone truly cared about either the way I played the game or the way that he wanted to play the game. He wanted to be the best basketball player that he could be. And as I got to know him, I wanted to be the best big brother that I could be.
“To do that, you had to put up with the aggravation, the late-night calls, or the dumb questions. I took great pride as I got to know Kobe Bryant that he was just trying to be a better person, a better basketball player. We talked about business, we talked about family, we talked about everything. And he was just trying to be a better person.”
The past-tense in each of Jordan’s recollections hit hard. Was. The word looked hard for him to say. Still, amid that pain and with fresh tears running down his cheeks, he gave Staples Center what they needed most — a reason to laugh.
“Now he’s got me,” Jordan said. “I’ll have to look at another crying meme. … I told my wife I wasn’t gonna do this, because I didn’t want to see that for the next three or four years, but that is what Kobe Bryant does to me, and I’m pretty sure Vanessa and his friends all can say the same thing: He knows how to get to you in a way that affects you personally, even if he’s being a pain in the ass. … The sense of love for him and the way he can bring out the best in you, he did that for me.”
It would take a giant to follow Jordan’s poignant blend of raw emotion and well-timed levity, but giants have always been comfortable walking the halls of Staples Center. Shaquille O’Neal stepped onto the stage and spoke — as only he could — about the one-of-a-kind relationship he and Kobe forged.
The duo famously had their differences during the Lakers’ three-peat in the early 2000s. Like Jordan, he remembered Kobe as more than a friend. He was a brother, one that O’Neal envisioned delivering a speech for at his Hall of Fame induction. Delivering a speech here, instead, pained him to his core.
“Kobe and I pushed one another to play some of the greatest basketball of all time,” O’Neal said. “And yeah, sometimes like immature kids we argued and fought. … In truth, Kobe and I always maintained a deep respect and a love for one another.”
As any big brother would, O’Neal promised to carry Kobe’s legacy forward by teaching his surviving daughters the game they shared a love for — but would omit any lessons on his famously poor free-throw shooting technique. And O’Neal, like everyone else in attendance, spent time searching for something to make the moment feel just a little more comfortable.
He found it in the thought of Kobe and Gianna holding hands and walking to the nearest basketball court.
“Kobe will show her some new Mamba moves today, and Gigi will soon master them,” O’Neal said. “Kobe, you’re heaven’s MVP. I love you my man. ’Til we meet again, rest in peace.”
But it was all there, really, in Ionescu’s words. The difficulty of reconciling how grief forces the past-tense upon us; the need to hold onto tiny slivers of connections; the search for something, anything, that can make what comes next look a little more manageable.
On Monday, Los Angeles mourned and celebrated and the world joined them. The grieving and memorializing may still be unfinished, and maybe always will. And maybe what’s missing can be found where Bryant told us to look all along, in continuing to endure through the hard parts, because life isn’t just about beginnings or ends, but what happens in between.
“Those times when you get up early and you work hard, those times when you stay up late and you work hard, those times when you don’t feel like working, you’re too tired, you don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway. That is actually the dream,” Bryant said during his jersey retirement in 2017.
“That’s the dream. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. And if you guys can understand that, then what you’ll see happen is you won’t accomplish your dreams, your dreams won’t come true; something greater will.”
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