A Right to Grief Isn't Conditional: Thoughts on Anthony Bourdain

by Nate Bethea

Cooking is my only hobby and I’m relentless about it. For someone like me, someone prone to overthinking everything, to obsessing and over-analyzing, cooking is incredibly therapeutic: there’s very little time to stare into a screen, but it’s a great opportunity to assume focus on the individual motions and actions that lead from laying down a cutting board to loading up a plate. There’s a comfort in the mechanics of it, like I’ve taken all the pressure off my brain for an hour and let it regain its natural shape. Cooking fulfills me in a way that very little else can.

Cooking is also more forgiving of mistakes than you might think, barring some notable exceptions like ill-balanced cauldrons of oil or roux left unattended for literally ten seconds. As a college student, I experimented with sauce ingredients almost daily, absent any foresight or planning, sometimes happening upon combinations so abominable that only a total fumigation of curry powder could make them edible. When I was broke, I assembled meals with ingredients on markdown at Kroger; when I was flush with cash, I bought fancier ingredients from an overpriced co-op that also sold healing crystals and macrame.

The 13 months I spent in Afghanistan were the only time in my adult life that I didn’t cook (but, as a close friend will affirm, I did fly to New York on mid-tour and insist on cooking a massive dinner for him and his girlfriend while so hammered off wine that I thought I could see the future). My tattered college notebooks and green Army leader books are full of grocery lists and recipe ideas, as are my graduate school notebooks, or the notebook I use in my full-time job today. And throughout all these years there was one person who contributed more to my sensibility about food and the social power of the dining table than anyone else: Anthony Bourdain.

Here’s the thing about Anthony as a TV personality: he was a singular presence, a truly rare combination of empathy and ferocity (you may recall when he absolutely slaughtered an arrogant aspiring chef for trying to put butterscotch on scallops), one of the most humane people in recent memory, but the medium hid a crucial detail about him—the man could fucking write. He ran a piece in the mid-2000s about overpriced hype dining, a genre of restaurant he called “pan-Asian terror domes with $22 drinks,” where “you’ve spent more on water than you’d usually spend getting heroically drunk.” In his cookbook Appetites, he asks whether risotto purism is really worth “abandoning your guests for twenty-five minutes while you stand there in the kitchen, stirring fucking rice.” His cookbooks, reportage, memoir, feature books, and novels feature laugh-out-loud funny lines, lines that stick with you because of their sheer biting cleverness. He wrote the most damning condemnation of Henry Kissinger that I’ve ever read, its fury condensed it to a single flawless paragraph. I remember so many of his turns of phrase from memory after almost a decade and a half. I can’t even say this for some of my favorite novelists of all time.

Anthony was frank about his struggles with substance abuse and depression, and about the exploitative nature of the restaurant industry when it came to workers, to women, to immigrants. Fellow writers on Twitter have mentioned that he was one of the few TV personalities to present Palestine and the Palestinians with humanity, or to address the despicable treatment of Latinx people in America, or to explore this country’s fraught and cruel relationship with Southeast Asians. It seems to me that Anthony Bourdain found good in anyone who wasn’t a prick or a an international war-crimes villain. All of which makes his passing so tragic. I feel we have lost one of the few truly conscientious people of our time, a beacon to us all—but particularly to Americans, powerless and mortified as our country digs its own grave and then plunders it.

So, then, what does any of this have to do with veterans? Why would anyone, veteran or otherwise, try to scold people for feeling sad at the passing of a man who’d touched so many people in so many ways?

Well, as it often happens, some people wasted no time in declaiming any public mourning for Anthony Bourdain, because apparently mourning his suicide distracts from the issue of veteran suicide.

Now, no one needs to tell us that the military and veteran community has a suicide problem. We all have stories. I can give you multiple examples of people I knew personally or through close friends. In 2016, I joined a number of my former soldiers at a funeral reunion of one of our friends who’d shot himself. I know that veterans commit suicide and that it’s an epidemic, and I don’t need idiotic tweets like this to remind me.

Here’s the thing about that statistic, though: first, 22 is an inaccurate number. Second, the veterans committing suicide are primarily men in their fifties and sixties. Young post-9/11 veterans are tragically over-represented in their age cohort for suicide, but veteran men of Anthony Bourdain’s age are the ones killing themselves — and if grieving for him publicly helps suicide prevention in any capacity, it will absolutely help veterans as it helps other people at risk.

America has ever-worsening rates of suicide among people of Anthony’s age, particularly white people without college degrees, especially veterans. The only way we’re going to end this utter calamity is to talk frankly about it, to bring people into the fold whether they seem vulnerable or not, to destigmatize mental health treatment so that people don’t have to choose between care and their livelihood, to make all healthcare (behavioral or otherwise) free at the point of use, to share grief, and to care for those suffering among us.

Anyone — veteran or otherwise — who tries to make this or any other private tragedy into a scolding harangue is a disingenuous opportunist, and by shaming and shutting people down they’re likely worsening the problem. Sometimes it’s not about us, and I don’t know why that’s so hard for so many veterans and their dainty, porcelain-skinned remoras to understand.

I never met Anthony Bourdain. I always hoped to someday, but not in the way that you sometimes encounter famous people in New York; I always hoped that maybe I’d have the chance to publish something and cross paths with him professionally, and maybe in a discreet way find an opportunity to express my gratitude for all the ways he influenced me. I wanted to be cool enough and estimable enough that I could share a seat at his table and talk shop, one human to another, one cook to another, one writer to another, to hear stories that might explain between the lines all the ways in which a life lived humbly among people can lessen the everyday indignities and cruelties that seem impossible to escape. I never met him and yet his passing broke my heart. I cannot fathom the agony his loved ones must feel right now, and I just hope that the outpouring of condolences and grief might ease their suffering in time. He clearly touched and inspired so many.

So, let people grieve, you ghouls—you charlatans. Yes, we veterans know tragedy and pain and regret. So does everyone else who lives in the world, whether they wore a uniform or not, whether they speak your language or not, whether they look like you or not, whether they fought on your side or not. It’s hard and unfair and sometimes we have nothing to look forward to besides the brief, bright flashes constituting moments in warmth and good company. Anthony Bourdain knew that better than anyone. We lost him too soon and the world seems darker and meaner in his absence. We shouldn’t need permission to mourn the light we’ve lost.