Brooke Hogan Honors Hulk at the Beach: Grief, Memories, and Moving Forward

Nearly ten months after losing her father, Hulk Hogan, Brooke Hogan is learning how to carry her grief in unexpected places. On May 20, the 38-year-old shared an emotional tribute from the beach—a place tied to so many memories with the wrestling icon—where she spent time processing the loss that still feels raw.

In an Instagram post that hit different from typical celebrity grief posts, Brooke didn’t just drop a throwback photo and move on. She painted a picture of how the ocean became a conduit for memory itself: the waves carrying the cadence of his voice, the salt water mimicking his embrace, the smell transporting her back to days spent together on his boat.“If I could breathe underwater, I’d spend forever under the sea if it meant being that much closer to him,”she wrote. Those aren’t the words of someone making peace easily—they’re the words of someone still very much in the thick of it.

The timing matters here. Hulk died in July 2025 from a heart attack at 71, and the estrangement between father and daughter before his death was real and documented. He left Brooke out of his will, and she addressed it head-on in September 2025, telling TMZ that it was exactly what she’d asked for. But as Brooke later explained when defending her tribute song“Wanna Go Back”in December 2025, sometimes loss reveals things that hurt even more. Sometimes you don’t fully process what you needed to say until someone’s already gone.

That’s what makes her beach visit feel significant. She’s not performing grief for an audience—she’s doing the actual work of it, standing in the sand where they built memories together, letting the tears come without apology. Her husband, ice hockey player Steven Olesky, has been vocal about admiring her strength through this. And really, that’s the harder journey: not the public tributes or the songs, but the private moments where you have to stare at the ocean and accept that someone you loved on complicated terms is simply no longer here to work it out with.

Brooke’s path forward—whether through music, social media updates, or quiet moments by the water—is still unfolding. But what’s clear is that grief doesn’t follow a timeline, and sometimes the most honest thing you can do is show up at the beach and let yourself feel all of it.