Erika Kirk reveals her 3-year-old daughter still asks to visit her father after his death

3 November 2025

In a deeply personal interview, Erika Kirk, widow of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, shared the poignant and ongoing grief of her young children following his tragic death. The couple’s daughter, born in August 2022, continues to ask when she can see her father again despite Erika’s efforts to gently explain that he is now in heaven. “If ever you want to talk to Daddy, just look up to the sky and start talking to him,” Erika told her with a reassuring hug. She also remembered telling her daughter that her father was on a “work trip with Jesus,” a metaphor she used to help a three-year-old process a loss adults struggle to articulate.

Since Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10 while speaking in Utah, Erika has stepped into the role of CEO at Turning Point USA, the organisation he founded, while also managing the emotional needs of their son, born in May 2024. Although children’s names and faces have been kept private per family policy, Erika disclosed in the interview that her daughter recently asked if she could visit her dad an innocent question tinged with the weight of absence. Erika responded softly, telling her that one day their whole family will go together, acknowledging the young child’s need for connection as much as protection from trauma.

Explaining the delicate balancing act of parenting through grief, Erika shared that days often blend the remarkable with the mundane: the weight of public expectation as a figurehead and the quiet demands of a daughter who still reaches for her father’s presence. She noted the challenges in shaping language for young children lacking the tools adults use to verbalise loss. Her dedication to revealing these tender moments offers a rare window into the real reckoning behind headline-making deaths.

For her daughter’s emotional world, the father she barely remembers becomes less of a figure in memory and more of a presence in metaphor. “He loves you so much. Don’t you worry. He’s on a work trip with Jesus, so he can afford your blueberry budget,” Erika said at one point, drawing on a shared inside joke to blend humour with reassurance. These simple phrases take on enormous weight when spoken to a child learning to make sense of absence.

The interview also underscores the dual reality Erika inhabits: maintaining her late husband’s legacy in high-profile conservative activism while quietly guiding her children’s developmental milestones in raw new terrain. The children have been shielded from public exposure, with no names or faces shared online, but the emotional arc is unmistakable grief, love, opportunity, loss. Erika’s decision to share bits of the story suggests an understanding that children’s lives continue under scrutiny and influence, just as their father’s did.

In the midst of public honours and leadership transitions, the family moments emerge as the most vivid. Erika’s reflections invite audiences to see beyond the policies, the rallies and the public career, and into the moment a small hand reaches for something missing. For many readers, the image of a three-year-old daughter asking “Can I go visit my daddy?” will linger longer than any headline about boardrooms or activism.

As the world watches Turning Point USA’s next chapter unfold, Erik­a’s role expands chief executive, widow, mother and with it her public persona. Yet at home the stakes are deeply private. Her daughter’s continuing questions may not be answered fully for years, but they shape the groundwork of how grief is lived, how memory is fostered and how children of loss grow up carrying both big legacies and soft spaces of need.