In the past week, two famous people died by suicide. This is not the first, nor the last time that a celebrity will take his or her own life. As humans, in our culture, we feel sad about this. When it is a celebrity, we feel sad because we feel a connection to celebrities, and it is as if we lost somebody we knew, even if we didn’t really know the person. For some celebrities, especially those who are still making music or art or film or theater, we feel a justified loss because we know that we lost the chance to ever hear a new song by Prince, or see (or own) a new design by Kate Spade, or learn about a new fascinating place by Anthony Bourdain. It seems reasonable to be sad about that, even if it’s not the loss of somebody who is in our real lives. Suicide is complicated though, and I have very mixed feelings about it, and my thoughts aren’t entirely consistent with each other, but like other things I write about, I find it a bit cathartic to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and try to flesh things out a bit. The relative anonymity, and low volume traffic of this site of mine helps bring out the honesty too. Here goes…

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