Shitty Deaths, Personalized
This week, writers wrote in and helped us complete this Inverse Pitching assignment from a couple weeks back: Name a celebrity overdose death or suicide that shook you the most. We paid them $50 for 50 words. Some went a little over 50 words. One person went under. We compiled them and Edith drew.
ILLUSTRATED BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
Anthony Bourdain: 06/08/2018
Hotel rooms feel so lonely. After Bourdain died, addiction memoirist Mary Karr said watching him drink on TV was like “a slow motion car crash.” Projecting spiritual inanity onto his corpse angered me more than the suicide. Didn’t matter toxicology came back clear. Addiction is a scarlet letter, easy to spot, easy to blame. Just don’t acknowledge suicide has its own logic. Walking around, impenetrable. Feeling so far away from what’s in front of you. – Zach S.
Harris Wittels: 02/19/2015
Harris Wittels’ heroin overdose still rocks me. I still listen to him on all these old podcasts, all that he left behind, which helps, but it’s bittersweet. — Lara M.
Layne Staley: 04/05/2002
All the 90’s rockers suicides were gut punches for me, but the news of Layne Staley was a ruptured spleen of a wake up call. His voice and words were the vortex of my tornado ride from late teens into my early 20’s. He’d been dead over a week before anyone realized he was gone. That still hurts my heart for him to this day. – Cornell P.
Margot Kidder: 05/13/18
We had seen Lois Lane fall as far as we thought possible; hiding in a bush, disoriented, after being missing for days. She climbed out of that mental hole and got help and got back, never the same but seemingly stronger in the places she had been broken. But you’re never fixed, not truly, and the disease is always waiting for you. In the end she was found alone on the floor of her home, dead from a purposeful overdose of pills and booze. – D. F.
Heath Ledger: 01/22/2008
There’s this jarring return to reality after you leave a screening at Sundance, going from the too-warm makeshift theater to the frigid street. But there has never been a return to reality like walking out of the Eccles and being greeted by a blank-faced volunteer, robotically telling every moviegoer, “Good afternoon, Heath Ledger died.” The banality of the sentence made the shattering sudden loss all the more real, an overdose as disclosed by a grocery store greeter. – Devin F.
Scott Weiland: 12/03/2015
I wasn’t that huge a fan, other than the usual wheh-hennn-the-dogs-do-finder croon-along as”Plush” comes on the car radio during road trips, but it was a wake up. He died on a tour bus in Minnesota, not even with his main band or his other main band, but another one called the Wildabouts, which I assume had also grown weary of him. His ex-wife and kids pissed on him in a weird op-ed obit in Rolling Stone. He was 48, I was 41, but the autopsy revealed the junk inside him was exactly the same. – A.J.D.
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