I was right.
Her message: "Oh my god. Chester Bennington is dead."
I did the first thing any sane person does in 2017, and I googled it.
She was right. Bennington was dead, and the news was saying it was a suicide. It was what would have been Chris Cornell's 53rd birthday. Just like Cornell a few months earlier, reports said that he had hung himself.
My world bottomed out a little bit.
This friend and I talked a while longer. Years before, when we'd been freshmen in high school, Chester Bennington was who brought us together in the first place. We were sitting in study hall, maybe two weeks into the new school year. I was working on something, maybe, when behind me I heard a heated discussion about hot guys.
Naturally I was interested, so I started eavesdropping.
I didn't interrupt until one of the girls behind me said that the lead singer of Linkin Park was gorgeous, especially the flame tattoos on his arms. At that point, I couldn't help myself; I twisted around in my seat and demanded, of total strangers, "Oh my god, are you talking about Chester Bennington?? I love him!"
And a friendship was born.
It petered out eventually, as most high school friendships do. When we talked a few days ago, she mentioned that she hadn't really followed Bennington's life or productions much since high school. It makes sense -- when high school ended, though we went to the same college and majored in the same field, our lives took dramatically different paths. She went preppy and party-girl and pop, and I went tattooed and writer and rock. She dated a string of jocks, and I married my high school sweetheart. She embraced social media and attention, while I mainly use facebook to catch up via messenger and post sarcastic comments.
We are not the same people we were when we were 15, but Chester Bennington still unites us.
I first discovered Linkin Park during a dorky "teach your classmates about a band" project during 7th grade. No, I did not talk about LP; I talked about Creed, because I fashioned myself to be super angsty when I was 13. (I also did not understand the intense religious imagery until I was far older, but that's a different essay.) Some other group, full of douchebag boys if I remember correctly, did Linkin Park.
They played "In the End," and I was hooked forever.
Roughly 18 months later, Meteora came out.
I could not rush my mother to the local Borders to buy it because I was home with the flu. Instead, my dad bought it for me on his way home from work that night. He was so grateful that I was into rock and not the Rod Stewart/James Taylor crap my mom liked that I'm pretty sure if I'd asked for a Korn album, he would have bought it.
Meteora changed my life. Before that, I didn't know that music could speak to a part of a person that nothing else touched. I didn't know that music could embody pain, or heartbreak, or all the turmoil that could surround a person's life.
When, a year later, I realized my parents hated each other after a screaming fight one morning before school, I turned on Linkin Park. In the months that followed, as more and more fights filtered upstairs through the air vents in my brother's bathroom, fights that he and I listened to with growing apprehension and dread, I kept turning on Linkin Park. I didn't understand that "Breaking the Habit" was about Bennington's ongoing issues with substance abuse; I just understood that I wanted whatever was happening with my family to end.
On mornings after particularly bad fights -- which were fairly routine by my sophomore year in high school -- my dad and I listened to Numb on repeat while he drove carpool.
I followed all the side projects and experimental albums in the years that followed. Somewhere, probably in a drawer in my mother's house, there rests a copy of Reanimation, and the DVD "Live in Texas" that I watched on repeat because LP somehow refused to travel to my hometown.
I saw the first Transformers movie almost exclusively because "What I've Done" was recorded by Linkin Park.
"Minutes to Midnight" was the first digital album I bought -- the college town where I lived didn't have a dedicated music store. I remember burning it to a CD so I could listen to it on repeat while I drove home.
Then at Thanksgiving 2007, my parents finally, officially, separated, and Meteora went right back into my CD player for the next year.
There were days that year when I didn't listen to anything except Linkin Park -- I needed the familiarity of albums I'd loved for years, but I also needed the pure, heart-wrenching anger of Chester Bennington's voice. The man could sing like no other, but there was always something primal, something beautiful and raw about his singing. Like he felt every word down to his bones, like maybe, just maybe, he hurt like I hurt, and when you're 19 and your mother tells you that you don't count as part of your family anymore, you need someone else to hurt with you.
In summer 2008, Linkin Park finally came to my hometown as part of Projekt Revolution. My CB-obsessed friend and I went together, a last hurrah of our friendship celebrated with our favorite band. As we sat on the lawn of the amphitheater where they played, neither one of us knew this was the last real time we'd be friends. We just knew we were fulfilling the dreams of two 15-year-olds who didn't have a clue about the world, and loved the band that had introduced us to its hardships, and its power.
I know now too that that fact that they traveled with Chris Cornell was no coincidence. It was the only time I saw either man live.
So many important things in my life have their roots with Chester Bennington and Linkin Park. I learned to love tattoos because of the flames that licked up his forearms. I first understood just how much drugs and alcohol can fuck you up because I read about how LP almost broke up in 2006 due to Bennington's substance abuse problems. Anyone who knows me knows I don't drink; they probably don't know that, while today it's because I don't want the calories, when I was in high school, I never drank because of Chester Bennington.
I followed Bennington across music -- I listened to Dead by Sunrise because he was in it, and while I'd always liked old Stone Temple Pilots, I started listening to their new stuff again when Bennington replaced Scott Weiland as the frontman in 2013.
I remember how disappointed I was when STP made him tone down his vocals so he sounded more like Weiland, and less like himself.
And the only reason I ever saw Crank was because Chester Bennington plays a junkie that tells Jason Statham how to get the adrenaline he needs. It's a two-second cameo, yet totally worth the watch.
I won't lie. I've never heard The Hunting Party (2014), nor did I buy One More Light (2017). I probably will now, just because I want to hear Chester Bennington's voice again. I want to hear the emotions close to his heart before we lost him.
I have dealt with mental health issues for most of my life. I lived through high school in a fog of depression -- never diagnosed because it started in 2003, before the push of understanding mental health in adolescents, back when an acceptable response to my going to my parents for help was for them to say, "What do you have to be depressed about? Just be happy." And that was the end of it.
I pushed it away in college because I didn't have a choice.
But Linkin Park has always been there when things got rough. I was fairly stable until late 2015, sent into a downward spiral that ended up with me leaving the teaching profession by active shooter training early in the school year. I went home that day and listened to Hybrid Theory on repeat while I did kickboxing and kenpo, anything to feel like I could handle things again, like I could be strong again.
When I lost a student later that year, I played Meteora, and Numb in particular, on repeat every day while I drove home. I'd sit in my classroom in the mornings and cry because I'd lost a student and my students had lost a friend and I had no idea how to deal with any of it. I'd accumulated plenty of new music in the years since Meteora was my lifeline in high school, but that didn't matter; Chester Bennington's voice, his frustration, his anger, his furious refusal to give in, his determination to keep going, was what I needed to heal.
I am heartbroken to know that, for him, it was not enough.
I have dealt with mental health issues for years, but I have never reached the dark and painful point of considering suicide. Once, in high school, I remember thinking that things would be easier if I just wasn't there anymore -- that I wouldn't have to deal with anything if I just wasn't around. I never pushed past that, never got to the leap between 'not being there' and doing something to make it happen. I never started cutting or other self-harm activities, and I never did anything that would actively put myself in danger.
I was very, very lucky. I asked for help and didn't get it, but I was okay anyway. I survived.
When I struggled with depression and anxiety again years later, as I still do today, I knew better. I had a support system in place. I knew how to ask for help and get it. I knew how to manage it in my daily life, and when I didn't, I knew how to educate myself. It didn't make the experience less painful, but it meant I wasn't alone.
I can't know what Chester Bennington's life was like -- what he went through on the inside, what his support network was like, how many times or ways he may have asked for help or chosen to remain silent. I can't know what his pain was like, or what pushed him to make the final, horrible decision that he couldn't do it anymore.
I can know that he was hurting, in ways we have all hurt. And I can know that I will miss him forever, because what he did for music, and for me, changed my life.
Rest in peace, Chester, and thank you.
