Parts Unknown

The thing that troubles me most about suicide is thinking how completely alone a person usually is when they kill themselves. For months after my foster brother shot himself, I obsessively imagined the last hours of his life, which he spent drinking and allegedly looking after his daughter, though of course it ended up that he himself was the danger she needed to be protected from. It was hard to fathom the violence, of course, but the thing I couldn’t let go of was how completely alone he was inside his own head, how the echo chamber of his own mind became a place where an insane idea took shape and ultimately came to seem a practical response to whatever problems he had. Jesse was out of his mind in the last few months of his life. I won’t have this thing where we’re supposed to use fakey, kid-gloves language out of a desire to be “sensitive” — he was crazy, and in his madness he completely lost himself. If that turns you off, maybe you would feel better to know that I’m crazy, too, and so maybe I get to use that word by whatever logic you use to reach your opinions about words and what they mean.

Maybe this explains why I’ve been struggling with the news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide. I’m not usually one who gets too worked up about celebrity deaths; I see no reason to borrow trouble, as my mom would put it, by getting sucked in to a stranger’s passing. But Bourdain is — or was, I guess — different. It’s not that I was his biggest fan in the world, or that I idolized him, though I suppose I probably did, a bit. It’s that he, his life and the way he led it, seemed so big, so full, so admirably adventurous and brave. I know that that was almost certainly a concoction, a self-conscious fiction that allowed him to write good books and make good television — one doesn’t end up a drug addict out of sheer happiness, and Bourdain was quite frank about his past addiction. There was, however, something that felt really genuine about his relentless pursuit of all that people had to offer, whether that meant great food, unusual rituals, cheap booze, or the deep and lasting pleasure of simply knowing them. Bourdain wasn’t a politician, of course; he wasn’t even particularly polite to people, especially if he found them phony or venal. He was a man with a life full to bursting with friendship, though. That must be it. That’s why it’s so grieviously sad too imagine him reduced to the state of utter aloneness he had to be in when he hanged himself.

The reason I can imagine it so vividly, despite the fact that it seems so implausible — so implausible that some part of me frankly doesn’t believe that Bourdain died, and died in such a way — because I have found myself in that state so often myself. The reason I’ve been so open about my struggles with addiction and mental illness is because I’ve spent so much time contemplating the suicides of others. In so doing, suicide came to be dangerously understandable. I had for years, basically since the start of adolescence, had almost daily thoughts of suicide, though they were never more than quick flashes, a fantasy usually provoked by a riot of anxiety that I couldn’t control. But at some point it went beyond that. I could imagine exactly how it would work. And I scared the shit out of myself thinking about it. And I decided that the only way to prevent it was to start talking about it, because talking about it made it that much less likely I would ever find myself so alone.

So to see Anthony Bourdain, almost certainly the greatest food writer ever born, the seeming embodiment of living a life full of good company, leave all that behind on a dark night of the soul — it troubles me. It troubles me to think that no amount of friendship or fame or achievement or anything else is an adequate safeguard against the grinding loneliness of depression. That’s what depression so often amounts to, you know. The extended sensation of being completely marooned. It wears you down. It exhausts you.

I would like to end with a tribute to Bourdain, but every time I try to write honestly about all that made him a hero of mine I find myself crying. Actually, uncontrollably weeping at my desk. I feel ridiculous about it, and try to make myself stop. I can for a little while. But then I start thinking again. About how vividly alive the man was, and about how magically gifted he was at bringing that life to the page and the screen. He wasn’t just the funniest food writer I’d ever read, though he was; he wasn’t just the smartest and most sensitive writer we had about the privileges and glories and pitfalls of travel, though he was that, too; he wasn’t just a voice of surprising moral clarity in the face of a world that glorifies cheap commercialism and excuses rank hipocrisy, though he was that, as well. What Bourdain was, at least to this fan, was a shining example of all that was possible if you lived bravely and survived the landmines of addiction and failure. It’s been hard for me to imagine a life of fulfillment and excitement over the years. Bourdain seemed to suggest that it was all possible, if you just did it. And now he’s gone. Whatever pain and fear and loneliness he was masking with his bravado and cool crept up on him one night in a hotel room and he hanged himself. I don’t really believe it. But I can imagine it. It scares the shit out of me.

He’s an irreplaceable figure. There was never one like him before, and there will never be another like him again. I’ll miss him. I miss him already. Goodbye, Tony. The world will never be the same.