On Thursday evening of last week while on break at work I read Chester Bennington had committed suicide earlier that morning. You may not know him as Chester Bennington, but you may have heard of him as the lead singer of the band Linkin Park.
I’ve always liked Linkin Park. Their music accompanies some of the best and worst times of my twenties—so it’s encoded deep. I’d heard of the deaths of Micheal Jackson, Whitney Houston, David Bowie, Prince, sadly the list goes on… but I never felt anything much other than everyone else’s sadness. This time though—I felt it, I felt my sadness along with everyone else’s. There was an emotional connection there this time, and it had formed in an unlikely but perfectly life‐like way: through death.
My life, like ours all, is one of coincidence. Among all the things that happened on May 14, 2007—my gramma dying was one of them and the release of Linkin Park’s third studio album was another of them. The two events are linked in my mind. A part of the album will always remind me of her.
It's pouring outside. Absolutely pouring. I can see it falling out of the corner of my eye now as I sit in my dark apartment listening to it hit and run down the windows. It's calming. Peaceful. Earlier today the green sky opened up above my parent's house and within minutes the streets were flowing with water so fast and so high the curbs vanished. I stood in the open doorway of the garage and watched the sewer covers blowing jets of air and water. The streets were full of metal whales jumping and splashing in the water. It was the kind of rain that washes away everything. On Monday night my gramma died. She's the first person close to me I have had to say goodbye to like this. I'm finding I'm mourning for myself and for all the people in my life she was a part of. It's a feeling I can't describe. I want the people I love to be okay. I want the people they love to be okay. Thursday is the funeral. Up until then this experience will have all been words I've heard and said. I'm struck aware of how my own words will fail. The power they have will suddenly be so small in comparison. ...still raining.
I wrote that on Tuesday in 2007. The following day, not knowing exactly what I was to do with the bereavement leave work had given me, I ended up at the mall because they say to try and do normal things when you’re grieving—so I went for a coffee and to browse CDs at the record store. Linkin Park’s third album, Minutes to Midnight, had just been released. I bought it, brought it home, and put it on to listen to while I looked out the window…
The first track, Wake, an instrumental of just over two minutes starts with the unmistakable crackle and pop of a record player needle settling into the grove of an LP despite the album being on a compact disc. The second track is familiar Linkin Park—I’m my own worst enemy, I’ve given up, I’m sick of feeling, I’m suffocating—relentlessness in screams with drums and guitar.
But it slows down with the third track—I’m caught off guard—When my time comes, forget the wrong that I’ve done, help me leave behind some reasons to be missed—and this is the lyric which would the next day play in my mind as I watched the peculiar, lost eyes of my grandfather when I don’t think he thought anyone else could see them. I know he’s had a challenging life—and as a result those around him have as well. Leave Out All The Rest was the track’s name, and it wasn’t the Linkin Park I was familiar with.
As if sensing my trepidation, the forth track was back on traditional form: a mashup of driving grunge, rap, and, yes, some square dance beats…
And then it all changes again. Everything slows again for Shadow of The Day, the song I still, after all these years, can’t sing without the tears. I’ve never actually seen the video for this song until today—I don’t know if I like the video to be honest, but I almost always think most music videos are a dumb, so maybe it’s just me.
But this is the song I hear and miss my grandmother. I miss my family. I miss a time I know is forever in the past. I miss what I know is gone. I don’t write this to be melodramatic. I write it because it’s quietly true. Change—irreversible, irrevocable, change—is a part of life, and what is loss other than another form of change. We are all at some point flowers or a cards on someone else’s window. We are all always minutes to midnight.
The rest of the album plays out. I can tell the band is taking itself in a new direction, adding depth to the angst of being an alive, aware, compassionate person. I’m sad and happy at the same time. The final track—The Little Things Give You Away—is a commentary on the various forms of non‐response by the United States government to the victims of Hurricane Katrina—hope decays, generations disappear, washed away, as a nation simply stares.
Linkin Park would go on to release four more studio albums, but none have had the traction with me the way Minutes to Midnight did. And to be honest, I haven’t even heard their latest three. I’m amazed as I write this to realize I haven’t even heard half of their music. Yet they sit in my memory as this important presence in my life, and there they sat until the jarring moment last week where I was scrolling through the headlines sitting on a pile of skids outside the warehouse were I work to read their lead singer hanged himself.
Emotions make so little sense to my rational mind—a peculiar biochemical reaction aware of its own state as it attempts to reconcile one moment to the next, each moment joined to the next by an illusion of continuity. But these confounding feelings, each horrific, terrifying moment of the unknown as one part of me sees them, is seen by another part of me as a just an infinite moment, neither here nor there: only moment one of one. There is no terror, no horror. There just is—and knowing that’s also as true as anything else… it’s comforting.
But I still don’t like talking about why I’m feeling something because a lot of times I know what I’m feeling is backwards. Happy things are supposed to make you happy, but sometimes they make me sad. And sometimes sad things make me happy.
I see light when told I’m looking at darkness. I see ugly things and find them beautiful—I laugh when I’m not supposed to. Or I won’t know how to end a blog post.
So—it’s come to this: Chester—play me out.
P.S. And don’t worry—I’m still here.