Heart to heart: On loss, grief, and Kobe Bryant’s legacy

But what seems like the worst to most people is the death of basketball legend, Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday, 26 January.

Since the news of his death, many have rushed to social media to vent, to share videos, pictures, quotes from him as they try to make sense of this unimaginable tragedy.

The situation is made worse by the fact that his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna Bryant was with him. Gianna, who was fondly called Gigi, was the basketball player of the family – the one who was supposed to carry on Kobe’s legacy in basketball.

It seems like even more of a shame knowing that detail. ESPN reporter, Elle Duncan said of him, in a clip that has gone viral and brought many to tears, that Kobe called himself a girl dad.

Even as people put pressure on him to try for a boy to carry on his legacy in basketball, he refused and insisted that he always wanted to be a girl dad.

Out of all the Kobe stories in the last day, this one hit differently.

Elle Duncan on Kobe “being a dad. A girl dad.” pic.twitter.com/tggiEmzIKc

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) January 28, 2020

As we think of Kobe, we also think of Lebron James and Lamar Odom, who wrote touching tributes for their friend and who still cannot speak of him without shedding tears.

We think of his family: his wife, Vanessa Laine Bryant, and his three daughters, the youngest who was born in June 2019. We try to imagine it but we cannot fathom the pain that they must be going through.

Loss comes in many forms for so many people. Most times, it transcends the bodies of the people who have lost and travels on the back of the things that the people we have lost have done.

Since Kobe died, many have paid tributes to him, have discussed the wonderful things he did for them and the way he impacted in their lives, and it is obvious that his reach spread far beyond basketball.

Kobe Bryant’s daughter should have continued in his path, but now she’s no more. We don’t know if either of his other daughters will pick up the mantle, but it doesn’t matter.

As we mourn Kobe Bryant this week and the weeks to come – because grief and loss sometimes take years to even begin healing – we would do well to remember that Kobe Bryant may have died at the young age of 41 alongside his daughter, but the legacy that he left lives on in the words that he said, the things he did, the people whose lives he impacted on, the friendships he made, and in his family, who he loved obviously and wholeheartedly.

We should take a thing or two from his life, and maybe try to carve out our own legacy. We should begin to think about it from now, even as we try to make sense of his death, and we should ask ourselves: when it is our time to go, what legacy do we want to leave behind?