IF GOLD RUSTS, WHAT WILL SILVER DO? ANTHONY BOURDAIN ,RIP

MOURNING THE  SAD SUICIDE OF ANTHONY BOURDAIN

I could not believe my eyes when I turned on the TV late to learn that Anthony Bourdain had  taken his own life while working in France  on  his show  for CNN.

Strangely, I feel personally bereft. I loved his show and often watched re runs --I felt that I knew him. He was one of those people who seem to have everything to live for. What is the stigma that hovers around suicide?
What is the conversation that we  can have with the people we love about suicide. 
Why do we ask why? When perhaps it was an action of a momentary despair not a reason. Is it because we think that if we know why, we can avoid that condition and not fall to the same fate.

This is as far as I could get each time I tried to write something about Anthony Bourdain.  It felt both too momentous and too presumptuous. 

Then I came across some words written by a  Dominican priest :

It is when we are finally stumped, when we can think of nothing more that we can do. that we can most easily--though even then it is not simply easy-- appreciate that problems are not just things  calling for solutions. A problem is, more essentially, a unique situation calling for expression.  It calls for a poet, a painter, a composer. And sometimes in God's providence we may be that poet, painter, or composer. Each individual  situation in our world is an artistic rather than an administrative challenge.
 Father Simon Tugwell, OP

I thought that there is something profound here. It helps explain to me why I have been so disheartened by the response--they only can give us an administrative response -- in the news: mainly being the flashing of phone numbers to call  for a suicide hotline and earnest instructions about how to talk to  a person who is talking about killing himself.  It is the same sinking sensation that I feel when after each terrible school shooting  they bring out the bromides about the mentally ill or the need for more guns  in schools. It is deeply sickening and discouraging. And administrative-- not creative.
These are deep problems in our society and they reflect a profound social despair.  How can we respond to that creatively and see it as  moment for creative self-expression?

WE will miss Anthony Bourdain and I wish that he had been able to find a creative way to express his despair  rather than the FINAL SOLUTION of  Self--destruction. 
He had brought so many talents to the TABLE OF LIFE  and now he has left it early --there is an empty chair.