Was that person selfish?

"Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain" was recently released on Netflix (original release worldwide was in 2021). In between Netflix movies I sometimes watch biographical series & kind of delayed watching this one, because I knew its sad ending. 

People around the late Anthony Bourdain saw how much promise he had; how privileged his life was; how lucky he was to have been in showbiz & to have traveled the world dining with fellow chefs and dignitaries; and they also loved him. So very much.

He committed suicide on 8 June 2018 in a French hotel room. His best friend chef Eric Ripert found him the next morning, which in the final scenes of the documentary, Eric said he will never talk about.

Are people who commit suicide selfish... leaving so many broken hearts and questions with their passing? How do the people close to him begin to process the void he left?

The documentary (to me) represented his life in a snapshot, so that people like me who are fans watching from the outside is given a handle on who he was. The interviews were well edited and timed; and personally I have always admired the storytelling skills in documentaries. There was that one issue  though, of an AI generated voice used to read his letter interspersed with his friend David Choe's narration (I will be using this as a case study for my computing ethics class, on the topic of "consent")

It is also reminder for self care: Tony never stopped running from place to place, he was away a lot,  filming (we're looking at about 250-265 days in a year)- that may have affected his relationships. He had a quiet side, but may not have leveraged on moments of solitude... since he was surrounded with people all the time.

One of his many memorable quotes (not sure from which TV series, he had many) was when he shared about how he started being interested in cooking. He had informed his parents, and the response was not encouraging. He had said something along the line of "... at that time, saying that I was interested to join a cooking school was akin to me wanting to be an arsonist". This is compared to the attitudes now: being a chef is a respectable profession as any.

My heart goes out to his daughter Ariane Bourdain. May she grow up to be a balanced individual under the tender loving care of her mom Ottavia, and may she forgive/ make peace with her late father.