Goodbyes and the perfect meal

So many witty, wise and thought-provoking things have been written about suicide. Some say suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness. Others believe it is our ultimate right to decide when we’ve had enough. Anthony Bourdain ended his own life. He’d had enough, I suppose. And we’ll never know what his tipping point was, and that’s okay with me. It was Anthony Bourdain’s life. My sister-in-law introduced me to Bourdain, the rogue and chef. She handed me Bourdain’s book, A Cook’s Tour and said, “You love to cook. You need to read this.” And so I did. I love to cook and I read the book. Apparently, it was the chronicle of Bourdain’s quest for the perfect meal. Each vignette seemed to be a quest to “top that”. Each morsel or meal described sounded more bizarre than those described in the previous chapter. The whole book made me think of a doomed person’s last meal. The difference being, the last meal on death row was usually just that, “the last meal”. My point is, and I really do have one, I truly believed, after reading the book, Bourdain’s quest for the perfect meal was going to be his quest for his last perfect meal. Either he would write until he died or he’d die having had the perfect meal. No one could have known what his journey was all about. After reading his book and watching his shows, I believed Bourdain would die young, but figured it would have been from food poisoning, or a gag that turned into a choke with no one around to Heimlich him, or one too many cigarettes, or too much booze and a tipsy false-step. I never saw past his public persona. I didn’t know his signs. I like it that way with celebrities. I’ve got enough going on in my own life. I don’t need to clutter it up with celebrity woes. Yet, here I am writing about suicide and Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain never inspired me to eat deep-fried rodents or seal eyeballs or sheep testicles, but he was like watching a train wreck. Indeed, I often recoiled in digestive horror when he hunkered down to a squirming heap of wiggly stuff, in his own way advocating for the value of local foods. I did admire the person, who seemed so full of piss and bravado. He was the bad-boy flame and I was drawn to him in his quest of social justice and entrails entrees. I was fascinated by Bourdain’s culinary life, yet I didn’t understand what motivated him to do the things he did when he could have lived the celebrity highlife in a studio kitchen, someplace. Perhaps, deep down, I wanted to be as carefree, careless and as reckless as he seemed to be. Like I said, I never knew why he did the crazy shit he did and it all was okay with me. Oh, I knew all about the heroin, the drinking, the smoking and other risky business he got up to. I really didn’t care about any of it. He was just a television chef who travelled around the world insinuating himself into cultures that weren’t pre-packaged and didn’t have a nicely paved path or a clean countertop. Anthony Bourdain lived hard. Somewhere inside of me, I wished I’d had the intestinal fortitude to live on the same, sharp edge, if only once in a while. Funny thing is, whenever I watched his television show, No Reservations, I saw only him, alone. I hardly gave a moment’s thought to the crew of people who followed him, who made the show happen. To me, it was just Bourdain and whatever he encountered in a kitchen in an off-the-beaten-path kind of place. Suicide never came to mind as a final course. Many years ago, a colleague committed suicide. His cubicle was next to mine. He just didn’t show up for work. It was almost two days before someone asked where he was. When the news of his death became public, those who worked with him were given the opportunity to speak with a counsellor, someone who would help us understand our own fragility and deal with our sadness. In fact, the counsellors weren’t grief counsellors, they were people who were trained to find barriers to employment. I passed on the opportunity to find out why I was sad and that it might be my job. As if by magic, literature appeared on our desks. We were inundated with booklets and pamphlets about the “signs” and how to help a person who was “at risk”. For a few weeks we were all showing “signs” and all “at risk”. And then, one day, we all seemed to go back to the business of having a job and life outside of the office. Or did we? How would we know, even if we knew the signs.

Goodbye Anthony Bourdain. Deep down in my heart I hope you did enjoy the perfect meal, and I smile because none of us will ever know what it was.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca