We lost an incredible human today. The entire world is grieving for Anthony Bourdain. He checked out at a time when we needed his voice the most and I have been crying all morning. I don’t understand why and it’s not for me to understand. He made a choice. An unfortunate choice but in that moment..his choice to decide he had had enough of the struggle that is life. Every other minute I say out loud “Fuck. Dammit Anthony..fuck.” It’s just one of those people..one of those things so very hard to wrap your brain around. It is a Robin Williams moment. I remember when he passed just wishing so hard that it wasn’t true. That we could just go back to before and none of this really happened…just please make this reality stop from being so.
Anthony’s shows..his way…his brilliance were highlights in my life. I was able to travel the world with him through his shows. I was able to learn so much about places I had never been and meet the people..learn about the foods they ate and come to the realization that we are all so very different but ultimately so very much the same. No other show did that for me. They are quite simply brilliant. And he didn’t always show the good parts. That’s what I loved about the way he could tell those stories. That he added the crap and the muck about these places too. More often than not directly related to governments or ideology and the way humans made a perfectly good thing into very horrific things. God damn it. Fuck. I don’t want this to be the end of his story. It is incredibly wrong. He survived things most don’t. It should not have ended this way. Not this way.
I go in between heartache and acceptance in what feels like seconds. I feel incredibly sad and low but at the same time I feel this incredible need to pick up the torch. To not let this break my spirit and not let this be the end. This man..this human…figured out things most of us look past and it probably was his “cross”. People like him see the details. The good and the bad and that can be an incredibly heavy bag to carry. It is a blessing and a curse when you “know”. When you see the light and the dark places. You don’t get to unsee these things. You carry it with you everywhere and I know he did. You could hear it in his stories and the way he told them. The absolutely brilliant way he told them like you were sitting across from him having a beer in some far off place and he was just telling you..in his words…in completely relatable and easily understood words. He had a way of helping you understand the most complex things going on in places you had never seen or even heard about. His gift was in how very honest and real of a human he was. His gift was having survived himself and his own humanity and short comings. I think this is why it is all so very hard to accept. If he survived all that…what exactly tipped the scales? What was the final straw?
It is sobering. I feel the entire world grieving because they know…they know what an impact it is to see someone like him…someone like HIM…give up. It’s not supposed to go like this. He wasn’t supposed to go like this. This wasn’t supposed to be the end of this human. Fuck.
You Had To Be There… 