Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan is in mourning after the sudden death of her son, Charlie Noxon. The 20-year-old died after a tragic skiing accident in Utah on New Year’s Eve. Kohan called Noxon her “best work” in an emotional Instagram post, alongside a batch of intimate family photos.
“He was my best work,” Kohan wrote on Instagram. “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. My baby. My golden child. My beautiful boy.”
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Kohan continued, “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?”
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Many of Kohan’s colleagues took to Instagram to share their condolences.
“Oh Jenji, i am so deeply sorry for your loss,” Alison Brie, who stars in GLOW, wrote. “Sending all my love to you and your family.”
“Dear Jenji, You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers,” Halson fashion director Cameron Silver wrote. “I am so sorry. All my love, Cameron.”
“Dear Jenji, I cannot imagine your and your family’s pain right now,” GLOW actress Sunita Mani wrote. “My heart is with you and yours. I’m so sorry. Sending love and thoughts.”
“There are no words,” American Horror Story actress Leslie Grossman wrote. “May his memory be a blessing.”
Noxon was on a family trip to Park City Mountain ski resort with his father, Kohan’s ex-husband, Christopher Noxon. While trying to navigate a fork in a trail on Dec. 31, he hit a sign. Noxon, who was wearing a helmet and an experienced skiier, was airlifted to a nearby hospital where he died.
“Our hearts are shattered,” Kohan and Noxon said in a joint statement. “The cliches about moments like this are true, it turns out. 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.”
“He was questioning, irreverent, curious and kind,” the statement continued. “There are no words. But words are what we’ve got right now, along with tears and hugs and massive quantities of baked goods and deli platters. Charlie had a beautiful life of study and argument and travel and food and razzing and adventure and sweetness and most of all love. We cannot conceive of life without him.”
Kohan and Christopher Noxon were married for 21 years before their divorce in 2018. They are also parents to son Oscar and daughter Eliza.
Kohan is best known as the creator of Weeds and Orange Is The New Black. She is also an executive producer on Netflix’s GLOW.
Photo credit: Efren Landaos/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images