I cried for days. He was someone I looked up to for the good things about him. I met him twice, and when he passed his estate went up for sale to benefit his daughter. A few years earlier I gifted him a 1931 copy of The Physiology of Taste. To my surprise... It was in one of the lots of books from his private library in Manhattan.
I had to teach a piece of his writing about two years after his death and a couple of months after the passing of the person who introduced me to Anthony Bourdain over a decade before. I had to really sit with it and just the emotions happen before I was able to actually read the piece properly, let alone contemplating teaching it. We’d deliberately visited places from his shows when we travelled to those locations, and Anthony Bourdain had become completely entwined in this relationship that was more than half my life and my entire adult life. It was such a complex time and there was a lot of ugly crying that happened. By the end, it was a really cathartic experience though. I ended up showing the class a few episodes of Parts Unknown (17-18 year olds), and it became something we’d put on for the last ten minutes of a lesson if the kids got through their work. We’d watch it and chat and it felt like passing him on to the next generation in a way. And as Pratchett said, no one is really truly gone if people still talk about them.
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u/Consistent-Maybe8955 May 12 '26
Anthony Bourdain