"When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind."

"I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not. I no longer take this person seriously. I may be able to appreciate what he or she did artistically but it’s impossible to feel bad for them. Their life wasn’t cut short — it was purposely abandoned. It’s hard to feel bad when the person did what they wanted to. It sucks they are gone, of course, but it’s the decision they made. I have to respect it and move on."

That's not the only point Henry Rollins makes in "Fuck Suicide." My son John focused on one of the other points over at Facebook, where I'm participating in the comments. I'm choosing to focus on this because it made me reflect on the way I feel when artists who have spoken to me kill themselves. Unless they are in the final throes of a fatal illness, their suicide reveals something about the mind that gave rise to the art, and it infuses that art with different meaning.

I might still listen to Kurt Cobain or read David Foster Wallace, but always now only with the knowledge that this material came from a mind that was moving toward death. The comedy of Robin Williams was hilarious. He's not so funny now.

You made speaking to us your life's work, and then, in the act of rejecting life, you changed the meaning of that work. And unless you worked in solitude, you changed the meaning of the life's work of those who worked with you, who played in your band, who acted alongside you in your movies.

Perhaps there are some in your audience who will find new depth and poignancy in you work, knowing that your preferred annihilation to this world. But I'm with Henry. I walk out on that show.