Writer – deTraci Regula
Editor – Justin Howard @Jthnomad
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” – Seneca
Bourdain’s New Burden – By His Own Hand He Hurts Us All
By deTraci Regula
Anthony Bourdain just walked out before the end of his shift and I don’t want to believe it of him. Surely he would stick it out no matter what, and not leave us scrambling around during a lunch rush. Not for a an emergency or a great passion or a drug deal or in protest of some brazen inequality, but for a date with a bimbo named Death. I want to run after him out the kitchen’s back door with a spatula raised to strike, screaming.
I’m not forgiving this one, unless “new information” comes straggling in and he was dying of an incurable debilitating and uncontrollably painful disease, under indictment for something that would send him away for thirty years, irreversibly depressed, or some “X” reason I can’t even conceive of right now that could possibly justify his act. Was his health an issue? I don’t know, but watching a recent episode, I thought “That man does not look well.” And I didn’t like that thought, because I so loved his apparent vigorous and passionate embrace of life – and, especially, of dinner – with both hands, juice up to the elbows, that I didn’t want to think his diet might not be agreeing with him as, all too obviously, it wasn’t.
I’m one of the millions that didn’t know Bourdain but loved him in my fashion. My only thin thread of connection was that I was once credited as a consultant to a consultant to an assistant to a fixer on one of his Greece episodes on “No Reservations”. I don’t even remember for what, but I think it was sharing a contact to either a trendy or am old-fashioned yogurt maker on Zakinthos. Shamelessly, I’ve written that tenuous connection down on a couple of vitae – and here. And I sat up close in the side rows in front of the panel table at a presentation he did one year at Comic-Con fearing that my admired inspiring hero would prove to be insipid in real life but no, he was just as expected – bright, charming, unflappable.
He was an unwitting companion to me during a long wet pre-menopausal week on the island of Santorini, when I’d picked up a copy of his novel “Gone Bamboo” which was my reading material through those days. His novels were fun but forgettable – I can’t even remember now where “Gone Bamboo” was set or any detail of its construction. But I can almost quote verbatim his subversive account of eating an ortolan in secret or any of several pithy narratives about challenging, even war-torn environments where he was blithely combining food, politics, and brave un-pc judgements. I thought he was brilliant, sexy, and not suicidal. How could he do it, during shooting season for his show? With an 11-year-old daughter about to enter the crucial “I need Daddy’s love and approval” years? I know there will be plenty of people quick to educate me on all the politically correct and compassionate reasons why. But I’m not there yet.
He’s not the only one whose self-imposed death disturbs me. I regularly go through the Robin Williams tunnel which leads to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a sweet thought thought to commemorate him with it (though mildly confusing – why this bridge, why this tunnel, why commemorate a successful suicide so close to a bridge famous for providing the means for them? Couldn’t that be seen as a teensy bit inciting?) but every time I go through it, I am irritated with Williams, though he had one of my “acceptable reasons” in play. I feel an existential wincing just as I drive into the echoing, dimly-lit tunnel which in its own way is coaxing – actually demanding- that we all “Go toward the light!”
I hate the way that to me, suicide is like someone has listed all their amazing accomplishments on a piece of paper and then, in the last white space, scrawled “FAILURE” in red Sharpie and underlined it. All that I loved that they have done is permanently shadowed, smudged, marred, my affection for them retroactively labeled as misguided and doomed. I feel robbed and wounded, and in the peak of selfishness, can’t see why they didn’t stop to consider my feelings, multiplied by millions like me.
This is the first stage of grief, I know it. I’m sure I’ll soften – maybe. Though I don’t know that Bourdain, at his best, all savvy and snark, would want me to. He chose, apparently, not to ‘rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’ But I will, for him, for now.
Editor’s Note : Suicide is still a taboo topic of conservation for many today. The experts all tell us to make ourselves available to those who express suicidal thoughts and feelings. Yet in the typical Western DIY (Do It Yourself) method of addressing mental health issues they forget to include instructions how just how we are to ‘make ourselves available.’ But much more then just that our culture literally doesn’t allow for the emotional release of those effected by suicide. We are told to ‘understand the departed’s pain and carry on.’ If only life were ever that easy…
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