Anthony Bourdain

About a year ago, I started watching Bourdain's show on CNN.  I had dipped in and out of his work over the years, but there was something about the latest iteration of his show that really grabbed me.  First of all, it was beautiful.  No matter where they went, they framed gorgeous shots in ways that made foreign landscapes come alive.  Secondly, while I never really cared too much for the food segments, there was something about how the show used food to open up people and their culture.  Depending on the episode, maybe a quarter of the show as eating, and I never found it that interesting.  But it was clear that he used meals to open up the people he was talking to.  For a trained chef, he was an outstanding interviewer.

There was always a darkness about his work.  Rather he was never afraid to look into the dark places, either of his locales or himself.  In one extraordinary episode, he went back to Massachusetts where he had had his first kitchen job in Provincetown.  He was young, did drugs on the beach, fell in and out of love....But then he went to western Mass and visit communities ravaged by the opiod epidemic.  He sat in on a NarcAnon meeting and told his own stories of battling heroin.  In another episode in Sicily, a local chef took him snorkeling, and the chef's assistant started chucking frozen food into the water for them to "catch."  The incident left him angry and sullen.  He wasn't afraid to show that side.  He was on speaking terms with his devils and let you know it.

The "creative" types have always been prone to suicide.  I always felt that writers and painters were prone to it, because it is profoundly isolating work.  You compose your work alone, with no one but the demons and doubts in your head for company.  But Bourdain didn't work alone.  He had a crew, he was surrounded by others collaborating on his work.  He didn't die from the despair of looking at another blank page or blank canvas.  He was with his friend, Eric Ripert, with whom he made some of the very best episodes of his show, when he decided to hang himself.  He had a young daughter.

Suicide never makes sense from the perspective of those outside of the person taking their own life.  For many of us, having a beautiful girlfriend and young child, while travelling the world and being acclaimed for your work would be more than enough.  I've decided that the key to happiness in life is knowing that you are doing your best work and being recognized for that.  That and a family to share it with.  He had all that.  Yet it wasn't enough.  Maybe success is its own source of despair, especially if you feel it's undeserved.  If the world tells you you're great, you live with the doubt in your own authenticity.  And so you take everything you ever had and everything you ever will have and throw it away.

And that's ultimately the point of suicide.  In taking your own life, you are rejecting the world itself.  Nothing in the world is worth holding on to, so you let it go.  My life was touched by depression when I was younger, and staring at that blank page alone in a shitty apartment.  I still found something in the world to hold on to, and that makes me lucky.  What is so baffling is that Bourdain clearly saw the beauty everywhere, too.  He could glory in the Hong Kong skyline or an Armenian farm or a West Virginia holler.  He rejected the very world that he had helped uncover and show the rest of us was so beautiful.

Somehow that glory slipped away from him, and that means it can slip away from any of us.  If you feel it slipping away from you, please talk to someone.  You can start here: National Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-8255.