There are two threads I feel in the dark, one takes me toward self-preservation and, on good days, hope. And on the tough days the other thread takes me to an end like Anthony Bourdain. Like most I knew him through the a screen, through his words and like most can lay no special claim to him. My mind felt the distinct surface of those barriers on last Friday. As I had a drink in his honor, whiskey neat, sitting alone next to the back yard pool watching the light fade on the water. I rambled a bit. An atheist talking to a dead atheist I thought might make him laugh, as it should any good atheist. Prayers to nowhere.
The impulse to wonder what anyone could have done in those final hours is strong. To wonder how a man who curiously devoured life, who filled the last 30 years of his life with more experiences than most of us could given an extra lifetime, who seemed to have achieved that dreaded phrase that Americans are obsessed with: having it all. For depressed people “having it all” can mean greater risk; more people to fail and a deeper darkness. On a micro level, I know the self hate that waits on the other side; when I was musician and I performed the best I could, or after filming when you have wrapped, all that you experienced and achieved for that moment is now gone. It's just you left. The process is over. And then you start wondering if it ever happened at all. It’s like trying to touch fog.
When you are in that hotel room alone that is what the room is made of. The certainty that you can never have that again and it would be better not to try. To not want. To not hold on so tight. I don’t know what he went through in the room but I know on certain days the thread I follow through the fog in my mind leads there. What I focus on is one aspect of Bourdain that truly inspired me: his relentless reinvention and curiosity. He didn’t allow his background or age to keep him from transforming himself, from addict/chef, from chef to writer, from writer to tv host and finally to something bigger - a force that demonstrated that empathy can conquer the fear.