re: #182 The Ghost of a Flea

Dude,

People who kill themselves are often in a place where they imagine that everyone is better off without them around…and I’m saying that from direct experience and from being the person addressed by a suicide trying to explain their choice.

You stop thinking in terms of your absence being painful for others and start thinking of it as necessary because you’re going to make things worse if you stay alive. The fear that you’re a detriment to everyone around you is added weight atop the sense that you’re fundamentally not right because you’re in pain, and that you’re further not-right because you have these intense feelings that you know are crazy but feel inescapable.

Hence the number of suicide notes that both apologize for the act, but also try and claim that things will be better after the initial shock passes.

If you’ve never been to that point, fine. But if you have—and I have, and have barely teetered back from the brink—it’s so damn complicated when another suicide happens, and you see it both ways at once.

I probably don’t need to say it to those here who know, but, from all I’ve ever heard from or about those who suffer(ed) it, severe clinical depression is a complete mindfuck, as referenced above.

Trying not to be macabre, but I have to wonder if Asia Argento supposed stepping out with some other guy in Italy recently was what sent Bourdain over the edge or if it was something like with Robin Williams, where he might have found out he was terminal or at risk of losing his “voice” to disease and just decided to go out on his own terms in Paris while with Eric Ripert, a man who FWIK was one of Bourdain’s closest friends and the one who found the body.

Eric has to be fucking tore up right now…I feel for him.