National Basketball Association

Queen Mamba

Updated Jul. 17, 2020 8:43 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers

Vanessa Bryant’s strength glowed through the words of her anniversary post on Monday, but goodness, so too did her pain.

It was the kind of prose that knocks you on your heels, raw and stark and directly piped in from the deepest reaches of a broken heart.

“All he wanted was to spend time with our girls and me,” she wrote on Instagram, 78 days after the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others, and precisely four years since his final NBA game. “To make up for lost time.”

Lost time.

You don’t need to know Vanessa to feel how that’s the part that truly tears at her. The world got partial ownership for her husband for two decades, his basketball excellence requiring effort and sacrifice that took him away from home life and onto the practice court and to various cities for tens of thousands of hours.

Everything that came after, everything that followed that remarkable night of April 13, 2016, when he pulled together his ailing limbs and dredged competitive magic from his soul to sign off a Hall of Fame career with a 60-point jaw-dropper against the Utah Jazz, was supposed to be hers and the family’s.

That’s why you didn’t see Bryant at many Los Angeles Lakers games post-retirement. He dived headfirst into their home unit, junior basketball games, dinners and all the rest. Given that he doesn’t know how to stop competing he won an Oscar, he founded Granity studios and launched a children’s book series, from an office minutes from their Orange County residence. But his time, finally, was their time.

“He only got to enjoy 3 years, 9 months of retirement,” Vanessa added. “Life truly isn’t fair. This is just senseless.”

We are living through times that shift virtually everything about what we know and have already had a profound effect on how we think. Kobe Bryant told me once that he believed life was mostly fair, that those who claimed the biggest rewards were the individuals prepared to give most to their chosen field. He was a superlative talent, no doubt, but it was his insatiable and unrivaled ethic that propelled him to greatness.

But what would he have made of all this right now, where manifest unfairness shows itself on a daily basis, thousands of times, all over the world? Where a silent and faceless opponent attacks most fiercely at those who have already lived and survived through decades, or fought and won against killers like cancer? Nothing fair about that.

When Bryant died in January, it felt like it would undoubtedly be the biggest and most shocking story of the year, a stunning development that left millions rocked and shaken. The farewell at Staples Center was perfectly moving and beautifully profound. 2020, whatever else happened, looked like being known as the year Kobe passed. As thousands congregated in downtown L.A. and NBA players and crowds showed collective love, it was hard to imagine that something bigger could come along that would affect us more.

No one expected this.

Yet while our thoughts have understandably turned to immediate realities, to our own necessities and the fresh requirements of our altered existence, the Bryant family has had to go through all that, while still nursing their grief.

And though there are glimpses from Vanessa’s social media posts and occasional public comments, such things are always a lonely struggle. There are no wrong feelings when it comes to mourning. There are no absolutes, no appropriate way to remember.

When your world is turned upside down you are, in many ways, a hostage to the reactions of your own mind. Overwhelming sadness, intense anger, confusion and misery and even unexplained mini-bursts of euphoria can all be part of it. It is all normal.

While Vanessa Bryant’s plight is no more and no less important than anyone else’s, it is hard to imagine what it must be like negotiating COVID-19 and all its fallout so soon after a personal tragedy. The gut check reminders, all the time, such as Monday’s — that last game when the basketball community remembers those insane shots and the indomitable will.

But she cherishes the family hugs and kisses at the end of it. She focuses on the positive, because somehow, through all of this, Vanessa has shown the depths of her strength, which runs deeper than anyone could possibly imagine. She is without her husband, the father of her children, and that time she knew was so precious, yet she moves forward, one day at a time.

“It’s a beautiful time to be able to have this moment with my family and have the finish that we’ve had,” Kobe Bryant said in the video that accompanied her post. “It’s amazing how fast time goes, man.”

Too fast. Too few of those moments.