Erika Kirk, the widow of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, has forgiven the man who took her husband away from her and their two children.
She said her husband “wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life,” per Fox News.
“Our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.’ That young man … I forgive him,” Erika Kirk said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”
Erika Kirk spoke of forgiveness and her husband’s legacy Sunday at a memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged with Kirk’s Sept. 10 murder in Utah.
She started her speech with one of Charlie Kirk’s favorite Bible verses, Isaiah 6:8: “Here I am, Lord. Send me.”
She remembered when Charlie Kirk said it at the end of a conference.
“After Charlie finished, I met him backstage and I spoke to him … I said, Charlie, baby, please talk to me next time before you say that statement,” Erika Kirk said.
“Because when you say something like that, there is so much power in that verse … God will take you up on that, and He did.”
She also spoke of when she arrived to “do the unthinkable.” To see her husband’s corpse.
“I look(ed) directly at my husband’s murdered body,” she said. “I saw the wound that ended his life. I felt everything you would expect to feel. I felt shock. I felt horror and a level of heartache that I didn’t even know existed.”
“But there was something else too. Even in death, I could see the man that I love. I saw the one single gray hair on the side of his head, which I never told him about,” she said. “Now he knows. Sorry, baby, telling you now.”
Erika Kirk continued, saying she felt “great mercy from God” in her husband’s death when she saw a faint smile when she viewed his body.
“I also saw on his lips the faintest smile … it told me Charlie didn’t suffer,” she said. Even the doctor told me it was something so instant that even if Charlie had been shot in the operating room … nothing could have been done. There was no pain.”
Erika Kirk also talked about the private ritual that kept her marriage strong even though her husband was away a lot of the time.
“Someone once asked me how Charlie and I thought we kept our marriage so strong when he was busy traveling,” she said. “Our little secret: It was love notes. Every Saturday, Charlie wrote one for me, and he never missed a Saturday.”
“And in every single one of them, he’d tell me what his highlight was for the week, how grateful he was for me and our babies,” she said. “And always at the end, he would always end it with asking the most beautiful question, ‘Please let me know how I can better serve you as a husband.'”
Her husband’s faith was very important to him. He kept that alive through journaling.
“And one of the things he wrote in his journal was this, ‘Every time you make a decision, it puts a mark on your soul,'” she said.
“To those of you out there who just made that decision, and took the first step toward a spiritual life, I say thank you and welcome,” she said.
She stressed that left Earth “without regrets.”
“There was nothing that was too hard or too painful or nothing that he just felt like he didn’t want to do,” she said.
“Charlie died with incomplete work, but not with unfinished business,” she said. “And I will miss him. I will miss him so much. Because our marriage and our family were beautiful.”
Erika Kirk’s full speech was posted on YouTube.
