Orange Is the New Black and Weeds creator Jenji Kohan tragically lost her 20-year-old son, Charlie Noxon, after a skiing accident in Park City, Utah on New Year’s Eve.
“Our hearts are shattered. Our dear boy Charlie Noxon died on New Year’s Eve on a ski slope in Park City,” Kohan and her husband Christopher Noxon shared in a statement
“The cliches about moments like this are true, it turns out,” Kohan continued. “The one about life forever changing in a split second, about the fact that we are all bound up in a web of love and loss, about the primacy of community in times of unfathomable tragedy.”
“Charlie had a beautiful life of study and argument and travel and food and razzing and adventure and sweetness and most of all love,” Kohan’s statement continued. “We cannot conceive of life without him.”
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Charlie, who was a student at Columbia University, died after hitting a sign while skiing down an intermediate trail near Canyons Village. Park City ski patrol rescued him from the scene, but he was later pronounced dead.
Kohan posted a moving tribute to her son on Instagram following his death.
“He was my best work. A list of adjectives don’t do him justice. There is no justice. I am the luckiest person who ever lived in that I got to spend so much time and help grow this brilliant, funny, truly kind and thoughtful person-man-boy,” she captioned the post. “My baby. My golden child. My beautiful boy. I don’t understand what life is now without him in the world. I don’t understand where he’s gone. And I’m broken. How is this real?”
In the days following, she posted again, asking fans to “buy a stranger a cup of coffee” in honor of her son. “Charlie loved both coffee and strangers. Maybe even start an esoteric argument about nothing, talk about bears, ogle a dog, or take a long walk with said stranger,” she wrote.