Who cares if one more light goes out in a sky of a million stars? (It flickers, flickers.) Who cares when someone’s time runs out if a moment is all we are? (Or quicker, quicker.) Who cares if one more light goes out? Well, I do. — “One More Light” (Linkin Park, 2017)
Many Linkin Park fans still grieve over Chester Bennington’s suicide, even as the shock of it has started to fade, two weeks having passed.
No accompanying note or letter was found, leaving open to speculation exactly what drove him into taking his own life. Such speculations include his experience of sexual abuse when he was a child, his eventual struggles with alcohol as an adult, and recurring battles with prohibited drugs.
This article starts with the chorus of Linkin Park’s title song for what is now their final album, One More Light, released in May of this year. Although Chester neither wrote nor composed the song (it was from bandmate Mike Shinoda and British musician Eg White), when I saw him owning this song live on stage in a moving tribute to his friend Chris Cornell (of Soundgarden and Audioslave fame, who had also committed suicide that day), his emotionality and authenticity made me swear that it was really Chester’s song.
The lyrics explicitly but delicately (even rather eloquently) glimpses what is going on in a mind burdened by the push and the pull of self-destructive thoughts that are nonetheless unfortunately persuasive. The suicidal mind usually experiences and appreciates a logical consistency that a vulnerable heart easily mistakes for proof of the value of self-harm.
“I am a burden to my family. Therefore, if I am not around, I will no longer be a burden to my family.”
“I am just one of a billion pieces. The whole would not be any different if I were not around anymore.”
“My life is in too much pain. Therefore, if I end this life, the pain will be gone.”
Of course, these statements are not perfectly compelling in and of themselves. But under the right circumstances, if under just the right amount of pain, and with the wrong set of things and objects being available at that particular moment, all a hurting person needs to be convinced of suicide is the appearance or semblance of making sense that it is the answer to their suffering.
This should not surprise us. If the world that we live in comes at us with such unexplainable pain, senseless suffering, unbelievable abuse, never-ending misfortune, losses and injustices that cut us to the core — when everything makes no sense — we grasp for some way to force things to make sense again to us, even if the conclusion thereof is self-destruction.
Ultimately, what convinces somebody to take their own life is some deep lie that is difficult to detect at the peak of the pain. However, the struggling suicidal does not (indeed cannot) immediately see this, blinded, overwhelmed, shut down by the sheer immensity of his agony.
But truth saves: in each relationship, in each context, and in God. The despairing heart needs help as a drowning person needs a lifesaver at sea. There is little that they can do for themselves — they are trapped, and other people have to step in with truth, and pull the person out of the web of deceit that has been spun around them.
And unfortunately for Chester Bennington, that help did not come soon enough, and there is nothing that we know or can do about that. But in an increasingly estranging world, there’s bound to be someone nearby who needs your help.
Be one more light for people who are stuck and caught in the darkness.
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Author’s email: micahdagaerag@outlook.com
