I'm fascinated by the plights of artists and the often amazing, albeit tragic, art that comes about as a result of their pain and suffering. Van Gogh, Hemingway and Cobain may have lived in different times and used different mediums to express themselves, but all of them were masters of their respective crafts and all of them suffered from the same hideous, debilitating disease that eventually caused them to take their own lives.
I can understand how it happened. As the years went by and their brains decayed, they spiraled deeper and deeper into despair until they were so low that they firmly believed the only way out was with the shovel they used to dig their own grave.
I have to wonder if they had moments of clarity leading up to their demise where they stepped outside of themselves and thought "I am in real trouble, I need help." Or did they just head down that dark path without looking back?
As the years have passed, their deaths have come to be romanticized to the point that we forget the brutal truth - that they were sick. It is hard to avoid the bitter irony that the same condition that helped them create such beauty is also the condition that drove them to commit suicide. People have theorized at length about the correlation between creativity and mental illness. College courses have been built around it, people have given speeches about it, scientists have studied it and I have to wonder if that kind of awareness has helped to save lives.
Suffering from depression myself, I know that when I sink to the black place it's a vacuum of my own creation that prevents me from really understanding that I'm not the only one that feels this way. That's the problem with a vacuum - it consumes everything, including rational thought.
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