Talinda Bennington
A Vanished Love
“Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr
On July 20, 2017, musician Chester Bennington, of Linkin Park, was found dead in his home in Palos Verdes, California, the victim of suicide. His wife of twelve years, Talinda, her three kids with Chester, and her three stepchildren all mourned the loss and wondered what they could’ve done to prevent the tragedy. Losing a loved one to suicide leaves survivors with a cauldron of different emotions. Talinda says, “Forgiveness was one of my first feelings, the first emotion that I truly identified with, because I knew he was not well.” She had been well acquainted with her husband’s struggle with depression, and she’d tried to help him get ahold of his demons. She was there during all of his ups and downs. “I knew he didn’t ever intend to hurt any of us. My gut feeling was he was in a dark place and he just didn’t get out of it this time—it wasn’t his first attempt.” Talinda was able to empathize with her husband’s depression and suicide because she had witnessed his long struggle to control his illness. He had been attending outpatient therapy for more than six months before his death, actively working on his sobriety and depression. “We thought he was okay; he was at the top of his game. He had a number one album. He was speaking a lot about these deep, dark thoughts, which is a step in recovery, so they thought it was okay.”
Chester had been coping with depression and addiction his entire life. Behind his public persona, Talinda had watched and loved her husband throughout his private battle, which is why she felt such compassion and sadness after his suicide. Her personal feelings were in stark contrast to the public bashing she had to endure from some of Chester’s fans, who blamed her for her husband’s death. Some took to social media to blame her for not being more attentive to his mental health struggle. The backlash left her feeling wounded and resentful toward her husband’s choice to end his life, forcing her to carry this painful burden alone. She recalls moments when she would ask, “How dare you leave me with all of this to handle.” After six months of coping with the ongoing attacks, she finally accepted that she couldn’t control what was being said about her, or the pain and frustration that others were feeling over her husband’s death. “When somebody loses somebody they love, whether they know them or not, they just want to blame somebody. And I’m the easiest person to blame.” It was with this realization that she felt she had truly arrived at a place of forgiveness.
For Talinda, forgiveness is a process that she comes face-to-face with on a daily basis. To help her cope with the loss of her husband, and to continue his legacy, she now travels around the country speaking about suicide prevention and mental health awareness. She shares her story, knowing that she will get backlash, in the hopes of helping others who may be suffering as she and Chester suffered. She wants to give hope to others who might be struggling the way her husband was and guide them to a better outcome. It hasn’t been easy for her to face the hatred on such a frequent basis. When she encounters it, she tries to remember that the hate being expressed is coming from a place of pain, hurt, and loss. She reminds herself that she, too, has to forgive and move on. She draws strength from the knowledge that she has to be a positive role model for her children, who are also dealing with the new reality of life without their father. She reminds them to “stay with your truth” and not to pay attention to the negativity.
Being present for her children while also managing her grief continues to pose challenges for Talinda. Sometimes she questions how her husband could have left her with this harsh new reality. “Not only do I have to deal with our children crying and grieving, I have to deal with this publicly. I have to monitor my social media accounts and remove the hate that’s on there, because there are hundreds of people looking at that for inspiration and help, and I can’t have that out there. So I get really angry with that, and that gets directed toward him. But I quickly realized it’s not him.” What continues to anger Talinda is the suffering of their children. “I do get angry for them. It makes me very sad, because they deserve a father. To have to look your kids in the eye and say, ‘Dad’s gone,’ is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. That came with a lot of anger. And I had to forgive, because if I hold on to that anger, then I can’t love my kids with an open heart and help them through their pain.”
One of the most important steps Talinda had to take in forgiving herself was recognizing that there was nothing she or anyone else could have done to save her husband. He was “just not well, and he made a tragic mistake.” She recalls all the times Chester had been open with her about his struggle with depression, and how he felt that his family would be better off without him. “I try to remember that it was that broken part of him that took that action that night. And I can’t help but forgive him, because he truly loved us. He truly loved me. He was such a great dad. He was just not well, and he was so good at hiding it that it makes me almost have even more compassion for him, because that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to feel that bad and to not let anybody know.”
The last moments Talinda shared with Chester before his death had made it seem like he was in a stable place. When she reflects on the days leading up to his death, she wishes she had been more aware of his internal struggles, but she also knows that her help was often met with anger and denial. In the past, when she had tried to offer him the tools he needed to get to a better place, he resented her and pushed her away. It was the unwell part of Chester that isolated himself, rather than alerting her to his depression. Over the years she spent with her husband, she’d become familiar with the signs of addiction, but the signs of depression were much harder to recognize. “Depression doesn’t have a face, and it could look like somebody’s fully happy,” she explains. She knew that while she loved her husband and desperately wanted to get him the help he needed, it was ultimately in Chester’s hands to help himself.
Talinda will never know if Chester truly meant to end his life that night, but learning to cope openly with the pain, especially for her children, is her main focus today. She wants her kids to know that they are not alone in grieving the loss of their father, and that everything they are experiencing is okay. But there are times when her grief as a wife conflicts with her grief as a mother. “I feel like my marriage was betrayed, because he left. He left. He chose not to be here. And that’s betrayal, and with that definitely has to come some sort of forgiveness. But I feel that forgiveness when I understand his illness and his state of mind of thinking that we’d be better off without him, which is so not true.” Remembering that it was the mentally ill part of her husband that drove him to end his life allows her to let go of her anger and forgive him for his suicide. Talinda knows that she has the choice to forgive or to resent, and she has chosen to forgive.
Since the death of her husband, Talinda’s definition of forgiveness has become more solidified than ever before. The core is acceptance, which allows her to release her anger. Now, whenever she feels hurt, she also tries to look at her own actions to identify any role she may have played. If she notices that she has contributed negatively to a situation, she asks for forgiveness. But she knows that, in the end, forgiveness is something you do for yourself.
We all know someone who has struggled with mental health issues. It’s one of the most baffling challenges—almost like fighting a ghost: it can appear suddenly, then vanish, constantly changing shape. When you think it’s finally gone, it can return, darker than ever. And its greatest victim can seem like its most loyal ally, hiding symptoms and reassuring us when we should be most concerned. Talinda’s openness about Chester’s depression and death aims to lessen the stigma and bring much-needed attention to a crisis that cuts across every part of our society.
For me, hearing others’ experiences with the struggle to forgive—whether in dealing with loss or managing a changing relationship—has informed my own understanding of forgiveness and has pushed me to be more open about my own experiences. Listening to Talinda’s journey highlights the challenge of finding forgiveness when the person you need to forgive is no longer here to talk it through. Her courage showed me that, when that happens, increasing the dialogue about mental health is the only way forward, to let those in pain know that there are other options on how to ease their suffering.