Why We Mourn Chester Bennington and Chris Cornell

Stefanie Hoffman
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

I was never a fan of Linkin Park as a teenager in the mid-1990s, at the peak of the band’s popularity. The music was too loud. Too angry. Too fraught with an anguish that I couldn’t — at the time — understand.

But the recent death of its lead singer Chester Bennington, ruled a suicide by hanging, touched me deeply. I don’t know much about him — other than what has recently become public in the wake of his death. He was a just a few months younger than me. He suffered from sustained depression. And like many people imprisoned by mental illness, he self-medicated — although no drugs were found in the room at the time of his death. The details behind his decision to end his life in many ways remain an enigma.

His death mirrors that of his good friend Chris Cornell, the lead singer of ’90s grunge band Soundgarden, who similarly took his life by hanging just two months prior in May.

I don’t know these people. And no one in my circle knows them either. But celebrity suicides often have a grim and sobering effect on us. Perhaps, in addition to the sheer tragedy of it, we are forced to come to terms with our disillusionment when they remind us of life’s fragility, and acknowledge that those that we put on a pedestal and unintentionally deify at some level are, in fact, human. As such, they are prone to the same dark weaknesses, fears and insecurities that everyone else has. That no one is immune to the self-loathing, angst and abject pain that drives one to take their life, and no amount of fame, money or professional success can shield you from it.

Historically we have dismissed celebrities who commit suicide as products of their environment — victims of a lavish and over-indulgent lifestyle that somehow seems to lend itself to chaos and suffering. We shrug it off and move on with a kind of “that’s the price of fame” mentality.

The reality is that like many others, celebrities have likely lived with mental illness for a long time and many since childhood or adolescence. But as celebrities, a spotlight shines directly on their suffering, which is now squarely in the public eye and scrutinized in agonizing detail by a merciless and largely ignorant audience.

For parents of mentally ill children, these deaths are especially poignant — for a lot of reasons. But the most significant, if not the most obvious, is that we see our own children in these people. We have spent the better part of our lives — and our children’s lives — texting and calling them at odd hours to make sure they’re okay, taking phone calls in the middle of the night when they’re experiencing psychotic episodes, and repeatedly talking them off the ledge, both literally and figuratively. We have perfected our pep talks. We sleep with our phones. We have a list of suicide hotlines available at our fingertips and a bottle of sedatives on our nightstands. We get tired of this endless dance to which there is no foreseeable end whenever we get a call and it’s a code red. But we unfailingly take these calls or get in our cars or do whatever it takes to make it better again. We talk to our children calmly and lovingly, encouraging them to come home or to put things in perspective. We tell them that we’ll always be here for them because we don’t want this to be the one time we turn our backs and it ends up being the thing that finally breaks them. The thing that finally puts them over the edge and compels them to take an entire bottle of pills or a knife to their wrist.

Oh God, we have relentlessly prayed, please let this not be the time they end it all.

I had the privilege of seeing Zak Williams, son of the late Robin Williams, speak at a National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) fundraising gala in San Francisco last fall. During his impassioned speech, he relayed that there was a vast difference between the father that that world saw and laughed with on the screen, and the man he saw at home, who regularly fought battle after battle with his mental illness.

If there’s anything that we can take away from suicide is that we have a lot to learn about what drives it and a lot to learn about the people who attempt it. Among other things, we have to look beyond what we are shown — superficial indicators of happiness such as success or wealth or popularity or a full -ride scholarship — and pay attention to warning signs. We have to understand that suicide isn’t an act of selfishness or attention seeking, but a desperate cry for help. People that I know who have attempted suicide say that they didn’t necessarily want to die, but simply wanted to put an end to excruciating pain and saw no other way out.

Because it’s not enough to scratch our heads and say “Wow, he had everything going for him. Why would he do that?”

(Ending with a memorable and chilling poem by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson)

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Anything But That: Parenting the Mentally Ill Child

mother, mental health advocate and writer, raising awareness about teen mental illness with the aim of ending stigma and silence

Stefanie Hoffman

Written by

Mother, mental health advocate and writer, raising awareness about teen mental illness with the aim of ending stigma and silence

Anything But That: Parenting the Mentally Ill Child

mother, mental health advocate and writer, raising awareness about teen mental illness with the aim of ending stigma and silence

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