Chester Bennington is still not a martyr for the cause, but that doesn't make his life any less appreciated
Substack #14
I’d like to start with a content warning for discussions of Chester’s suicide.
I’ll never forget July 20th, 2017. I’ll never forget the laughing I did or the friends I made or the kid running out from our cabin at camp, having spent rare time on his phone and loudly declaring, “Chester Bennington has just died.”
Nor will I forget the woomph as the news hit me. There was a smell of a bonfire going, and suddenly I didn’t know why we were having a bonfire even though it was light. Everything seemed so far away. “No.” I said. I felt my face crumpling up. “What do you mean? What? What happened?”
Just 16 days prior, my then-girlfriend and I had been to see Linkin Park live. Their album ‘One More Light’ had been pretty up my street, but I was really there to see my favourite songs from one of my all-time favourite albums, A Thousand Suns. We did not know it, but we were among the last audiences to see Chester perform live.
“Well, it’s saying he killed himself.”
My first thought in that moment, the moment of finding out, was to check with my then-girlfriend. A much larger fan than I, I knew she would be devastated. I ran quickly from the bonfire to my tent and desperately held my phone in the air, trying to get even one morsel of signal. “I’m so sorry,” I kept muttering in between tears streaming down my face. “I’m not there, I’m so sorry.”
My ex and I both suffered with heavy mental health issues, neither of us coping even a little bit with puberty or the horrors of being an adult. That’s what our relationship ended up being built - and subsequently dying - on. We liked a lot of the same music, and it kept us going, but Linkin Park had songs that had really kept her alive. And in that moment, in the moment that something terrible has happened, I was not there for her.
In the arena remember watching Chester on the B-stage singing, “Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do”. I distinctly remember thinking, well thank god there’s always going to be somebody who cares, even from afar. I remember being proud of him, this adult man who was old enough to be my father. I don’t know. He was just singing his heart out in a way I hadn’t heard from him before, and I felt like he meant it. In hindsight, it all feels so very tragic. I think I was picking up on something in his voice that couldn’t be explained, some desperation.
I was sitting in the threshold of my tent, having given up on reaching my then-girlfriend, when the guy who’d told me came over, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were such a big fan.”
“Even if I wasn’t a fan, how sad is that…” I think I might have said.
In that moment in the tent, I somehow wished I could’ve helped him, said something. He didn’t know me, never saw my face, never heard my voice. But I somehow felt I was responsible.
The pain in recalling this memory still hurts me today. I thought of this man at his piano telling thousands of people not to give up on themselves, to have faith in who they were, to live - and I thought of the injustice. If he was telling me and my people, who was telling him? How come we got to have a figurehead for our fight, but he didn’t?
Many Linkin fans in that time had similar thoughts. People on there heralded him a genius, a spearhead, a revolutionary - and in many ways he was all of those things, and in a lot of other ways he wasn’t. He was nobody’s soldier. Nobody’s general. He was just himself and then he died.
A couple of years later, I was choosing which sets to go to at Reading festival, and I decided to go to Mike Shinoda’s set, Chester’s former bandmate. I wanted to check on him, I guess, check that he was doing okay, and sure enough, who did I bump into in the crowd of tens of thousands of attendees? My now-ex girlfriend, of course.
I cried with Mike that day, though I could tell he was doing his best. I was too embarrassed to check what my ex was doing next to me, but in my head I thought it felt right, that we should stand here together, years later.
We (or to not speak for my ex-girlfriend, I) get to live even though Chester does not. It is sad, and I listen to Linkin Park’s music with an echo of that grief.
Chester did not leave us with no wise words. I consider instead that gave us the answer to the glorification of death in A Thousand Suns. The album is a desert-island disk for me. It’s a concept album about the Vietnam war and Hiroshima among other things, literally comparing Chester’s struggles to wars fought and lost. There’s a Martin Luther King snippet, and a recurring motif of a line, one which is repeated in Japanese too, where Chester tells us the answer, years before he could no longer go on: “Lift me up, let me go.” 持ち上げて 解き放して.
Chester Bennington, on what is approaching the eighth anniversary of his death, remains to be just a man - perhaps a good one - who couldn’t keep going with the struggle that I and many others know so well. It wasn’t my fault, nor was it anyone’s. It happened, and what’s left is his work, on my phone and in stadiums around the world as arena shows are played by Linkin Park and their new lead singer.
Rest in Peace as always, man. I miss your talent in this world. Thanks for your art that still moves people in your eternal stillness.
And thanks to you lot on here for reading. I’m happy there’s still things and people and songs that give me inspiration (to the curious, I recommend ‘The Catalyst’ or ‘Robot Boy’ from A Thousand Suns).
Yours,
Quinn