by Jo Ann Rangel

Created on: November 20, 2008

The day after they found Kurt Cobain had killed himself up in Washington State back in 1994, I was wandering the streets of my city trying to make sense of why I felt like joining him. It was a kind of negative mental power I never experienced before-it was a thick coarse rope, slowly turning about my neck, pulling me toward the edge of a tall cliff. Everywhere I turned, it was the TV, the newspapers, and the weekly news magazine that arrived in my mailbox with his steadfast eyes on the cover warning me I was too late to help him climb out of his misery. Everything spoke of suicide, death, and the loss of my generation's John Lennon. I was the same age as Cobain, 27, and apparently I was walking a tightrope of would she or wouldn't she and I could not figure out where it came from for several days.

Everyday you experience events that you may not realize shape a small part of what you become later. My immediate family and best friends could not understand where I was coming from in how these events affected my story as a person. The outside world had labeled Cobain my generation's John Lennon; my baby boomer friends looked on in bafflement that the world compared their generation's hero who was murdered in cold blood in 1980 to a young slacker who took a shotgun to his face in 1994. There was a disconnect inside of me when I watched the widow Cobain walk among my generation in a stunned daze, trying to respond to the why before anymore of my kind allowed the rope to pull them over the edge. I stopped reading the newspaper for months because I could not help but keep a running count on the number of people who willingly walked that path and followed him to the other side, it was the human version of watching lemmings in action.

As old as the sky, there has always been melancholy, there have always been suicidal tendencies. Some famous deaths, many that make you wonder why even still decades after we read about the ones who didn't make it-somehow we got past it and kept living. We romantized it in the 1960s starting down the rabbit hole with Sylvia Plath and taking it to its technological and planetary extreme with the cultish Heaven's Gate. To this day you can't help but wonder what if the neighbor had managed to check on Sylvia an hour before. Too many bright lights burn out too soon to the sound of an unheard voice.

The best age old practice out of everything I have read or seen in my lifetime, is the sound of a person listening. It is a calm, quiet silent way,

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