Somehow I had the impression that AB had 2 college-aged kids. I must have assumed or misheard this when he took a gig as a guest on a celebrity game show, admitting it was a sellout thing to do but that he did it because he needed the money for something. I thought he said something about paying for college but I guess I filled in that assumption. He has one 11-year old.
I’m interested to know who heard his last words. Maybe we will hear more from Andrew Zimmern, who said in the Times obit about Bourdain’s outward appearance: “Things on the surface never seemed to add up or make sense.”
A Times opinion piece includes statistics that I’ve seen a number of times, showing a 25% increase in suicides between 1999 and 2016. It is a trend no one seems able to explain, though I think it shows an eerie parallel with the rise of social media.
45,000 suicides in 2016 average 123 a day. That is 90 times more deaths than are caused by accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. But laws enacted that require carbon monoxide detectors in every place of residence have no parallel in funding to identify or detect suicidal tendencies. Maybe that’s a far-fetched analogy (I thought of it because 20% of suicides are from intentional carbon monoxide poisoning) but the lack of clues left by suicidal people ahead of their actions shouldn’t be considered an unsolvable mystery of the human soul. We should be able to study this without bias. Then again, having said that, I find I cannot consider the subject too deeply without wincing, or getting weepy. People who do this are feeling the harshest pain one could possibly relieve, and any time I imagine what must be happening inside someone’s head to make suicide seem like a rational and appropriate action it makes something in my spirit want to throw up. I say NO but no way could that word be heard.
The 45,000 death statistics in 2016 don’t even include the ones who “got away with it” by discretely ingesting just enough of a drug to cause an overdose, or other subtle means to fool coroners into thinking their death was accidental when it was not. Among those would be the ones my mother referred to when saying that suicides among the elderly were more common than most people think, or than statistics reveal. But I suspect my friend S, who died a few years ago with pills and vodka at her bedside, might have been intentional. I also suspect L, who I knew from the early Internet days, took her own life. An acquaintance suggested to me that A., an artist I worked with in the early 1990s, let himself get killed by scuba diving way too far out into Long Island Sound. None of these folks were elderly, though L was morbidly obese. All their obits, like my father’s included the word “unexpected” in describing their deaths. That is something of a code word for suicide.
I don’t know if it’s altogether possible but attitudes about people who do this are set to change, I think. We might even reach a stage where taking your own life to make way for others or to alleviate any burden on society one might create to be an honorable and righteous thing. That was my dad’s reasoning. I never saw the suicide note but the detective on the scene read some of it to me, in which he said he was sick, he knew it, but that he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a vegetable, on life support; nor did he want to be a burden for anybody, which I assume meant myself and my sister. I just wish he chose a less disgusting means.
My mother’s attitudes about suicide were all over the place, as I posted earlier. One day she said it was the most selfish thing you can do, then she threatened to do it herself if I enlisted in the military. She held in low regard the parents of any young person who killed themselves, saying it was bad parenting. I think that’s a generational thing, but given her awareness of and work with the mentally unstable it still comes off sounding wrong to me that she felt that way. When Tony Dungy’s 18-year old son killed himself my mother said she lost any respect for the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, saying that good parents don’t let things like that happen. I don’t think I believe that, but then she followed the story more closely than I and I don’t know the details of what happened.
Well, enough about this. I’m going to follow the details of the AB investigation but do not expect much clarity. I think there is a point of pain and panic where rational explanations have no meaning.
