Chester Bennington Support Thread - We're here for you

It was 6pm my time. Nobody is alone, we can always come here if we need someone to be there and talk to.
Thank you <3

 

Whereabouts are you @dreamerpoet? I'm in the UK. I love how we can connect across the world on here and find we all have such similar thoughts and feelings regardless of culture

 

Please stay safe

 

And you @Lynn

 

I'm in Canada and you took the words right out of my mouth

 

Hi all,

first of all I wanted to write that this forum is so nice. I read this threat and it really helped me through the last days.

Me personally I am a bit late in posting sth. However getting the following lines out of my chest helped me a lot and if it helps others to read so I will be happy.
I am not sure where I could post such a post but here it goes:
---

I was 14 years old when I first saw “one step closer” on MTV and I can tell you – it was love at first lyric. Since that day I was obsessed with linkin park, their music, their lyrics, their energy – everything. They got me into music, into writing, into creating, into art.

Linkin Park taught me that
music is my inspiration / music is the air I’m breathing / walking on air / feeling the rhythm / feeling the flow / letting your hand write the words / letting your pencil draw the picture.

Linkin Park taught me how to be in the flow when I was a teenager. And they taught me how to use this flow to deal with all the pain you can have inside, how to use creativity to get rid of all the things on your chest. As all of you I can so fucking relate to his lyrics what makes the connection so deep and processing of what has happened so hard.

I also have this dark side or dark place or however you would call it inside my head. I went through some serious deep years but luckily I got my shit together.

Linkin Park taught me that
Life sucks / but you can’t throw it away / so put your shit into a piece of paper / get up / and continue / to live.

Thank you Chester Bennington for teaching all this and much more to me. It really helps me right now as ironic as this sound.

Now I am 31 years old and I was still listening to this band. As most of us I was never seriously affected by the passing of a celebrity. Tragic, yes, but let’s go on. The day I read about Chester passing away – it hit me like a train. Suddenly I was 14 again and so fucking hard broken.

Turns out with the age of 31 I learn, that losing your childhood hero can break your hard so much and can hurt so much as if you just lost the love of your life.

Dear Chester,

Turns out you are teaching me with the age of 31, that we are all just moments and that these moments aren’t endless. Turns out you are teaching me with the age of 31 that if I have an idol I should hurry up telling him or her that I appreciate the work or whatever it is, that I should in general provide more positive feedback instead of just focussing on how we could do better. Suddenly I am grounded again.

Chester, I thank you for everything even though this was unfortunately a one side “relationship”.

After all these years I am convinced that this life on planet earth can be in the figurative sense heaven or hell. It just depends on our current situation but I am pretty sure you had a lot of these heaven days beside your dark days.

We will always miss you.

Much love.

 

As it is past midnight here, I have something to get off my chest:

It's been exactly one month since my last LP concert and a week since our friend and hero went to the other world. I've been dealing with all sort of feelings for the past seven days, some days were better than the others but there's one which stays with me all the time: sadness. A complete and utter sadness. Questions swirl in my head: why? Why did he have to leave so early? Could he be saved? Should he be left alone? Was this the first suicide attempt? Completely irrational because depression and demons were too strong and nobody could have done anything. But these are all normal questions a person asks after someone she cared about dies. It will take some more time to process them but the most important thing is not to give up and stop negative thoughts. The thing that hurts the most is how Chester was good at hiding things, wearing a mask in front of us and the outside world. Yes, I believe this suicide was spontaneous decision which wasn't planned for a very long time but just in February he was talking about how bad he felt. I guess now is the time to say a final goodbye even though it's so damn hard because we all thought he'd be here forever, that he was invincible, that they'd continue writing music and talking to us through it for a very long, long time. A few weeks ago we talked about the new LP sound- that's how strongly we believed in them.

A month ago I was at their concert, watching how amazingly good they were, how they hit each note perfectly, moved around the stage, a perfect combination of energy and the band that knew what it was doing and felt comfortable doing it. Also, my dream came true and I met them. I can't express how surreal the experience was: I was standing in front of people who helped me so much, were my voice when I was too insecure, afraid and angry at the world to voice my opinion. When Chester came into room, everything I knew about myself was gone and he made me feel like a teenage girl. But he was so humble, so nice, so down to earth and easy to talk to. I hear a lot of that these days from various sources.

So...I'd like to end this with a thank you to our hero for every song and verse he/they wrote, for being our voice, our support, for touching and saving so many lives, for showing us there's light at the end of the tunnel and hope we can overcome anything life throws at us. Thank you for being so kind to us fans, for the M&G, for getting into the crowd whenever it was possible. But, mostly, thank you for being a human, such an amazing human being. And I'm so so so sorry it had to end like this, that none of us saw it coming. Even though I wasn't following you for some time, you were always somewhere in my mind and I'm so grateful to whoever enlightened me to actively start listening to your music. I can't believe how incredibly stupid I was, one more thing I feel guilty about.

To Mike, Brad, Phoenix, Joe and Rob :I hope you guys don't feel guilty and you'll be able, one day, to overcome this personal hell you're now going through. And I hope you'll continue making music because we fans will support you as we're LP family.

 

My story is the following:

When I was six years old having been born perfectly normal, I was diagnosed with CRPS, which is complex regional pain syndrome. I have pain 24/7 all over my body and it literally never stops. You can look up the CRPS pain scale on google or find it attached to this post. I have been struggling since and there is no cure for it, and yes it did eventually spread throughout my whole body. When I was diagnosed my cousin at the time had showed me Linkin Park and that's where my healing came from. I would listen to them all the time before procedures and surgeries or any other scary event for me, they were there for me. I loved Chester, his voice to me was the most amazing in vocal strength in how he could go to expressing emotions that I felt loud and strong to a calm, soothing voice that would comfort me at night telling me it would be okay. Linkin Park has been a huge part of my life, where I used to live was a small town city in Texas. Fast forward to present day and now I live in California, during The Hunting Party Tour, there was a raffle in our LPU to see who would get the last meet and greet with them. Having before thought I would never see them live and just collecting DVDs of live prefomances of them to know what it would be like, this was a once in a life time oportunnity for me. I wanted to tell him how they had helped through thick and thin and all. Having been in a Catholic school too didn't help much either at the time since it was also very strict and the teachers thought I was faking my illness, because I look normal on the outside (even after going in the next day from surgery with brace and everything). Soon enough I got an email that said I was chosen to go meet with them, it was the happiest day of my life. I had bought a LP cloth poster with me to ask them to sign it for me. Turns out that thankfully I met the band and they were the sweetest down to earth people you could ever meet. They signed the small poster that was given to us and my cloth poster. When Chester came around I had asked if I could please tell him my story and he allowed me to tell him everything I had gone through with my pain and how thankful I was. He hugged/held me while listening to me and even though the manager told him to please keep moving forward he told him that that he wanted to continue talking to me. With the most calm and gentle voice he told me to let him know the rest. I was of course in tears through this because never in my life would I have thought that I would meet Chester. He saw I was wearing my LPU tag/lanyard on me and he asked if I wanted him to sign that as well. Before I could answer he signed it and gave me the biggest meaningful hug and knowing gaze that showed that he understood me and how grateful I was. The cloth poster is now hanging above my bed where I look at it at night and my tag is pinned next to my bed as well. There are no words to say how thankful I am. My mother was also there with me at the event and she too cried when she had said. "Thank you so much for helping my daughter."

 

What a beautiful memory to have.! I teared up.

 

Thank you so very much for your kind words, it means the world to me <3

 

Very inspiring story, thank you for sharing!

So sorry about hearing about what you have to live with. Stay strong, I know you can make it through the pain

 

I hope that memory will carry you through as you work through the grief.

 

anyone think chester's death and cornell's could be linked via Pizzagate?? lots of fishy stuff if u ask me..

 

Nah man, keep that conspiracy mess outta here

 

This is a thread for grieving and emotional support, this is off-topic to the thread, so please keep that in mind.

Also, I don't think most fans appreciate such conspiracy theories, I agree it's hard to accept what happened but discussions about things without facts to back them up is a bad idea and negatively affects the healthy way to grieve in this situation.

 

Thanks for sharing and please stay strong. Omg it almost made me cry

 

It's morning here and somehow I managed to fall asleep, must have been because I was really tired after these days. In the middle of the night I woke up with my heartbeat really fast because I suddenly thought bout today, Thursday, it's a week now. It was 6pm my time and I'm scared find of this time today. Thinking thought like "could be he killed himself in about 2 hours last week"... You told me so often to not think like this - don't thinks thought like this - and I'll now try my best to not to. It's just really hard after a week when you realize it still kills you inside.

 

A real inspirational story to all of us

 

What's hard is that earlier I listened to lp I thought of my pain but now listening to them I think if his .. This is much worse for me. Sorry Chaz for being selfish.. I didn't mean it like this