One year later: Remembering Chester

I remember the first time I heard Chester Bennington’s voice.

I had just graduated high school, was a freshman at Montclair State, and still carried all the angst and know-it -all-ness that comes with being 18. I was driving to school when “one step closer” came on the radio, it’s brash “and I’m about to break” shriek forcing me to turn the volume up ‘cause I love music about being mad.

As a lover of rock and hip hop and the fusion of the two that Linkin Park themselves popularized, “hybrid theory” was something I was bound to stumble upon. Needless to say, I remained a Lincoln Park fan from Meteora to Minutes to Midnight up until the very end(?) with Living Things. “Numb” remains one of my all time favorite songs. Which is also needless to say, I hate knowing that he’ll never sing it again live.

I remember seeing Lincoln Park in concert with Stone Temple pilots. As a long time STP fan, I was actually surprised by how much I preferred LP’s stage presence and performance over STP’s. Weiland was a rock gawd, but there was something about the way Chester gripped the mic, funneled his goddamn soul into its bulb like a lightening bolt that moved me, excited and electrified me.

As a young, tattooed, angry queer woman, there was a huge part of me that resonated with what I gauged was Chester’s personality: sometimes funny, a friend’s friend, with a bit of underlying bu obvious controlled sadness, a kickass desire to fuck shit up and make great art. He quickly became one of my favorite frontmen. And I always knew he suffered from depression, anxiety, and addiction, but I never thought that we would end up sharing these in common. There was always some hope though, offered in almost every album LP put out, no matter how dim the light seemed.

But Life has a way of sucker- punching you when you’re not looking, of letting you dwell in the cave of darkness without realizing that you’re really buried. And as pissed as I get when I hear about celebrity suicide, or any suicide really, especially people who die by suicide and leave behind little children and loving families, I know that mental illness often times wins over our drive to survive.

We can’t blame Chester or Bourdain, Spade or Williams or Cornell for their choices, no matter how much money they had, how much access they to counseling, how selfish their acts may seem In the face of so much other human suffering. As someone who has consiserved suicide as an alternative to the situation(s) I was in, I can attest to how strong the pull of despair is, how utterly useless you can feel because of XY and Z.

All we can do is help those who are still alive and with us to stay alive and with us ( Chester’s wife TaLinda is a huge supporter of ChangeDirection.org). We can remember them by playing or blasting their music, watching their movies and laughing, traveling the world and expanding our horizons the way they did. We can honor them by celebrating the creative inside each one of us.

So go sing ”Papercut” at the top of your lungs today. Go try a new food or read/play your own art at an open mic. At the very least, go hug someone tonight who needs a hug as much as you do. As much as we all do.