Dear Chester;
I’ll never tell him how much I cried that day. How, as he pulled out of the driveway and disappeared, I collapsed, a shattered disaster after too long trying to keep satisfied a man insatiable. How everything he wanted me to be was never good enough.
I’ll never tell him how long I stayed on my kitchen floor with a bottle of rum when I found out he’d been cheating for three months. How, in the millions of reasons I had to quit, I kept looking for one excuse to hang on by a snapping thread. How that thread broke in mere seconds.
I’ll never tell him how I felt him slipping away long before he slammed the door for the last time. How my trying too hard sacrificed who and what I was. My begging for him to actually fucking see me, to acknowledge that I still wanted to be his everything. To make him see I was as depressed and miserable and desolate as he was. That we could get through it together. Make this work like we promised.
“I haven’t noticed.” Is all he said of my depression. There I was, in our kitchen we’d renovated together, where he’d proposed to me, and as fast as all those dreams glimmered, they fractured in those three words. That was the moment I knew I’d lost him.
I’ll never tell him that him rupturing our marriage nearly turned me into an alcoholic, and how it nearly drove me over the suicidal edge.
I’ll never tell him because I promised myself years ago after my abuser was finally gone, that I would never, ever let a man make me feel that worthless, low and awful again. No partner is ever worth that. I had to love myself more.
I’ll never tell him how, two weeks after finding out he cheated, my entire world was further crumbled by one of my heroes committing suicide. I was at work the day I heard Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, killed himself after years of battling depression. I bawled all day. It ripped a piece of me from my soul I’ll never recapture.
For as much as Linkin Park’s music got me through the darkness of my teenage years, the “One More Light” album also got me through the divorce and continues to do so. It took me a few months after your death to actually listen to the album fully again, but once I got over how eerie and haunting many of the lyrics are, it became a foundation to surviving. It took me back to your older music I hadn’t listened to in a while. I found myself once more letting “In the End” carry me through the depressive, sometimes suicidal, episodes.
Oh, Chester. It’s been a year since I walked out of my marriage and you left us. I don’t have words for how both events devastated me. If someone I looked up to, adored and admired, a fellow survivor, got to 41-years old before giving up completely, what did that bode for me? Would I lose it completely when I got to that age too? Simply give up after years battling depression and C-PTSD? If so, why was I even trying? Do we really get so far to merely fall?
I questioned existence. Whether it mattered. If there was no point to existence, then what was the use? I spent my days in this monotonous haze, going to work, coming home, drinking heavily, more often than not sobbing on the floor again. Ending my marriage destroyed everything I thought my life was going to be. Dreams to dust. Visions to ashes. Remnants. And he walked away like the years we spent together were nothing. Like I was nothing. Disposable.
What I want you to know, though, Chester, is that it was love, support and most of all, music, that saved me. Rock and roll saved my fractured soul. It pulled me off the floor and let me put the bottle down long enough to gain some clarity. I was better than that.
I discovered what it was like to go to rock shows alone. To get lost in a crowd of people I had something in common with. I’m a girl who always feels so disconnected from society, isolated. That is, until I find a rock show and a sea of strangers with which to share the music. I went to see One Bad Son, one of my current favourite Canadian bands. Back in March this year, I also went to a concert of another band that saw me through my teenage years: Shinedown. It was a heartbreaking reminder that I will never see Linkin Park live, but it was also enlightening and empowering. I met a young high school girl much like myself, who was at her first concert. We cried together. Hugged. Brought together by this music that gets us through the difficult days.
Later this year, the third band that was an adolescent favourite of mine is coming to town. Three Days Grace. I can’t wait. It’ll never complete the trio, but as Meatloaf once sang, two out of three ain’t bad.
What I also want you to know, Chester, is that while your passing made my depression spiral at a time when my world was ending, it also made me stronger. In all that questioning, as a suicide attempt survivor, it became a stark, startling reminder of how close it has come. I think that’s why your death has been so painful. Many of your fans have been in that pit of despair. Losing you was like losing a fellow soldier in battle against this monster of misery.
I don’t think stronger is the word. It made me more resolved to come out above my mental illnesses. Something about surviving the things Linkin Park’s songs always got me through feels like the right thing to do to honour your memory. Oh boy. Here are the tears.
I can’t judge you. Not at all. You couldn’t carry the load anymore. We all know how that feels. I only hope you have found peace, an exquisite resting place and somewhere the music can also save you. You were a gift to this world. I am only sorry this world was too heavy for you. It has a way of breaking the strongest of us.
Your songs are forever. And you will remain an impact on people like me. Thank you, Chester, for being there even when you didn’t know you were. For continuing to be. Existence is indeed temporary, filled with adversity and hope and light.
But rock and all…that’s forever. And we all have to care when one more light goes out.
