Kidada Jones Reflects On Relationship With Tupac, "He Was the Love of My Life"

Who was Tupac Shakur? This is a question that if presented to anyone on the street; they would be able to tell you whom he was to them, how his music has affected their life since his death and how it still has a place in hip-hop 20 years today after his passing and has been named one of Hip Hop’s greatest lyrical poets of all times. While the suspicions surrounding his death has plagued many minds and hearts, there’s one heart that still holds him close and that’s the heart of Kidada Jones, daughter of musical icon Quincy Jones.

Kidada had only been dating Tupac for four months when he was suddenly taken away from her forever, left wondering what would have become of their love had things been different. Would it have grown even stronger; would they have gotten married, maybe even had children? These are all questions that unfortunately she would never know the answers too. According to published reports, Kidada Jones was one of the last people to have spoken to Tupac. In an interview with the Washington Post, Jones recalled the final words the two would ever speak to each other, “Do you know I love you? Do you know we all love you?” she said to him as he lay in a hospital bed.

After asking him those questions, Kidada stated that he nodded, “Yes”. As she turned to the door he began to convulse and fell into a coma, never to speak again. Penned in an autobiography of her father Quincy Jones, Kidada stated:

“Tupac was the love of my life. He and I lived together for four months and then he was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996. It was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.”

Kidada, who was with Tupac in Las Vegas on that fateful September night when he was gunned down, was staying in their hotel suite when she received the life-changing news. After rushing to the hospital, Kidada stated that she was handed Tupac’s bloody clothes and was told that Shakur had no blood pressure when he arrived. Visibly shaken, Jones recalls that she then headed to the parking garage and walked around for 9 hours repeating to herself that “He couldn’t die.”

“I knew we should’ve never gone to Vegas that night. I had a horrible feeling about it. I’ve gone over it in my mind a million times. It wasn’t supposed to happen. We weren’t supposed to be there. It was the worst possible thing that could’ve happened — I still to this day don’t know who shot him. I wasn’t able to say goodbye. It’s not something that should happen to anyone.” Kidada wrote.

To this day, Kidada Jone’s left arm still bears a Tattoo of the slain rapper:

Kidada Jones with the Tupac shoulder tat. Crying. pic.twitter.com/xeKyNBQHXN

— Christina Sterbenz (@xtinasterbenz) September 1, 2016

Jones and Tupac’s relationship didn’t spark the “good vibe” with everyone, Jones’s father, Quincy Jones, was outraged when he found out that the two were a couple. Before the hook-up, Tupac had made some harsh remarks about Quincy Jones only dating white women in which resulted in messed-up kids. Kidada ran into Pac at a night club in which the rapper apologized to her for his remarks; they later started dating. Quincy Jones even got a chance to speak to Tupac about the incident:

“Tupac apologized for what he had said about me and my family. We became very close after that,” Quincy stated.

Years later in his biography Quincy Jones had this to say about Tupac:

“The tragedy of Tupac is that his untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country. If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler nicknamed Detroit Red,” Jones wrote. “And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer; just a sliver of my eventual life potential.”

And he couldn’t have been more right, What would Tupac be doing today had he had lived; he was just getting his grip on things not just professionally but in life period. We lost him at a time when Hip Hop had already given him the King status and Hollywood finally taken notice of someone who really represented who we were as a culture. September 13, 1996, the world sadly watched as Tupac took his last bow before the show really started. Breaking even the toughest men in the hood, Hip-Hop has never really recovered from the tragic loss more than two decades later.

Rest In Peace Tupac Amaru Shakur.