Erika Kirk’s Eulogy Stopped Vice President JD Vance in His Tracks

Published: June 12, 2026

By Movieguide® Staff

Vice President JD Vance had a quiet moment of reckoning at one of the hardest funerals he’d ever attended.

“In the impromptu eulogy of her deceased husband, Erika convicted me, though I’m sure she didn’t know it,” Vance wrote in an excerpt published in The Wall Street Journal ahead of his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “Had I ever yelled or lost my temper with the kids? Indeed.”

The excerpt, from the book releasing June 16, centers on the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk — Turning Point USA founder, Christian conservative activist and close personal friend of Vance — who was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. Movieguide® covered the tragedy extensively, reporting on the nationwide grief and what many called “The Charlie Effect” in the weeks that followed.

In the days after Kirk’s murder, Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance flew to Utah to be with Kirk’s widow, Erika. What they found there shook them both.

“Erika’s thoughts kept returning to her kids,” Vance wrote. “Charlie had been a devoted and loving father, and it crushed her to think that their children — then aged one and three — would have few, if any, personal memories of him.”

At an impromptu eulogy, Erika described a marriage Vance found hard to dismiss: Charlie “never yelled at me. Never cussed at me. Never lost his temper with me or the kids.” That quiet testimony cut deeper than any policy speech.

“I realized that in such moments, everything worldly we value fades to nothing,” he wrote. “Erika didn’t care that her husband was politically influential or had the president’s ear. She cared about her babies and the fact that an assassin had stolen Charlie from them — so many memories and moments with their father robbed from them forever.”

“I found myself wondering what my wife and kids would say about me if an assassin took my life,” Vance admitted. “Mostly good things, I thought. But none of them will care that I was the vice president.”

Charlie Kirk had a profound impact on me. Both during his life and, as I discuss in this excerpt from my new book, after his death.

This was hard to write about but I hope you’ll find it meaningful.https://t.co/JExbF5irNr

— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 6, 2026

The grief reshaped more than Vance’s parenting perspective — Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two children with Charlie. Usha, who had told her husband for years she was done, changed her mind.

“Something changed for Usha,” Vance wrote, “and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy.” The couple already has three children: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.

“One life was stolen from us, but another was given,” he wrote. “I don’t know why God does things like this. But I am grateful to Him that there will soon be another source of joy in our lives. Another person added to the communion of our family and hopefully to that of the Church.”

Vance — a practicing Catholic — also wrote about the cross-denominational friendship Kirk, a Protestant, had modeled. “Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion,” he reflected, noting that Kirk helped him see Catholics and Protestants share the same Church, even across real differences.

For anyone who followed Movieguide®’s coverage of Kirk’s assassination, Vance’s reflection lands differently. The man who spent his career urging young Americans to marry and have children left behind, in his death, exactly the testimony he lived — and it found its way into the second-highest office in the country.

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