June 24, 2017

The Mourning Dove

The Mourning Dove

While sitting in our family room the other day, my father, still reeling over the loss of his beloved son-in-law, saw a bird beyond the sliding doors pacing back and forth on the patio. At first, he didn’t make much of it. The next day, however, the bird was still there, trying to flap its wings to take flight to no avail. He told my brother who, knowing how much Chris loved birds, gently gathered the bird and took it to a rescue facility on the west side. Once there, we were told the bird was a young mourning dove suffering from respiratory issues. We checked back a few days later and were told the bird is healing and will be released into a sanctuary once fully recovered. I am told the Mourning Dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, of peace and hope. I don’t know if this is a sign from my sweet Christopher but it sure feels like one.

VC

Think on the cov’nant thou hast made,
And all thy words of love;
Nor let the birds of prey invade,
And vex thy mourning dove.
– from Psalm 74

June 20, 2017

Toni

Daddy,

Let me start by saying how much I love you and how much you mean to me. You are my idol, someone I’ve always looked up to. You were always there for me. You pushed me forward every day, and you still do.

Whenever I cry or feel like there’s no way I can go on, I hear your voice, “Don’t sit worrying peanut. Worry is a waste of time, I’m ok.”

I always took what you said to heart. Probably because everything you said was so smart.

Every time you came home from tour you spent all your hours with us. No matter how tired you were, how many time zones you traveled, you were there for us.

Whenever I was sick you would take care of me. You would cuddle with me, hug me, kiss me. You didn’t care about getting sick. You would stay up all night to make sure my fever went down. And if it didn’t, you would wake me up and give me my medicine. I would open my eyes, see you, and feel better.

I have so many memories with you but one of my favorite ones was earlier this year when I was jetlagged and we watched ‘Purple Rain ‘. We were staying at the BHH and you came into my room when I was trying to find a movie to watch.

“How about Purple Rain?” you said. I always trusted your judgement. I put it on and immediately fell in love! We then got to your favorite song, ‘The Beautiful Ones’.

“This song is so special it doesn’t even belong in a genre. When I was in my twenties, I saw this in the theatre and some guy started cracking up laughing at this scene and song. It got me really mad, ” you said.

I fell in love with the song too and listened to it on repeat.

Our special connection was always the arts. Poems, books, music, writing. We both have a unconditional love for it.

Who’s going to introduce me to movies like ‘Purple Rain’ and songs like ‘The Beautiful Ones’ now? I’m hoping I will find some because you trained me so well.

I know you are still here, and the warmth I feel beneath the cold, is you.
YOU ARE THE BEST FATHER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. And I know, that if this wasn’t an accident, you’d still be cuddling with me watching ‘Purple Rain’.

I love you and miss you so, Daddy. You deserve your own day to be celebrated because you are the best dad anyone could ever have. Happy Father’s Day!

Love,
Your Baby Toni

Lily

Papa,

A couple summers ago we were biking around Central Park and you told me that there aren’t many truly good people in the world, but that I was one of the few. You always had such firm confidence and pride in what I did, and your warmth and love inspired me to do my best. Now more than ever, I want to live my life to help others as you did. I want to continue to make you proud. Toni, C and I promise to
survive, persevere and thrive, as we’ve always done. I’m so proud to be your baby, I love you more than words can say and I will miss you forever.

Your ladybug,
Lily

June 19, 2017

Father’s Day – VC

To my sweet love, you are missed so very much. Perhaps if you had not been the most amazing daddy always giving all your attention and love it would not be so excruciatingly hard. You gave with all your heart and it makes the void so much more painful. We don’t know how to be without you. I’m trying though for you and for our beautiful children. We love you most!

VC

June 14, 2017

Linda Ramone

My friend Chris, whom I’ve had so many wonderful cherished moments with, from Johnny, me and him at Ramone’s Ranch eating breakfast together, Johnny having Chris sing Elvis songs in the Elvis room and listening to The Beatles, to after Johnny passed, JD and I spending many vacations and holidays through the years with Chris and his wonderful family. We were always dancing and singing, and having the best time. I’ll always remember Chris’ beautiful smile being around the kids and Vicky , how they filled his heart and eyes with love. I know there won’t be a day I won’t miss him. JD and I will always be there for his beautiful family who have become our family.

LINDA RAMONE

June 6, 2017

Coop

Chris,

I met you before i met you.
I loved you before i met you.

17 years old.
Didn’t know who i was or what i was.
Lost.
I will never forget the first time I heard your voice

1996- in the front seat of a friends t-top-ed nissan 300zx
Tucson Arizona.
College
Your voice came thru the speakers and pierced.
Permanently.
It was a sound I had never heard before.
It broke through the rib cage, the muscle tissue, bypassed every organ until it landed somewhere deep the center of my heart.
it was unlike anything i had heard or felt. Penetrating, Exotic, intoxicating, hypnotic and powerful beyond words.
It still can’t be described. There is no definition.
It was freedom. It’s was pain. It was boundless.
It made me feel ok, and safe while at the same time, unbridled, wild and free.

In 2009 i got the chance to meet you thru work. I couldn’t believe this was possible. A closeted rock and roll wannabe movie agent gets to sit with an idol.
I will never forget the first meeting.
Green army pants
Brown, beaten-to-hell boots, laces unraveled and open at the top.
White thin t shirt.
And, the token, cornell, oversized, cashmere,cozy sweater lazily wrapped around your 6 foot frame.
Badass, black irish curls, taking a nap around your face, not giving a fuck.

But in that first meeting, behind the facade of the rock god, was the most gentle soul and eyes, that when for the briefest second, met mine, spoke a profound poem of love, curiosity, depth, and with a snappy sarcastic, humor and wit.

We bonded quickly.
The jew from canada and the legend. I referenced my favorite movie moment in one of my favorite movies, Collateral, being the one with the coyotes with Shadow on the Sun playing in the background, literally changing the complexion of the entire movie. It’s one of the great, existential, profound, poetic things I’ve ever seen on screen.

So here we are , The black irish gentle man who hailed from the gods sitting in my office.
Cracking low volume jokes.
Cracking himself up.
Slightly sarcastic.
Actually, very sarcastic, but with a deep subterranean connection to everything that he said and felt.
Not a word was wasted.
The jokes were deeply rooted in truths.
Everything was rooted in truths.
The next day, my cell phone rang with the UNKOWN NUMBER on the screen.
I picked up.
There was a low volume voice already mid stride and mid sentence on some rant about politics and the world. The voice was raspy, quiet and frisky. That was the beginning.

I loved our hikes.
I loved our pace dinners.
I loved our phone conversations that were at times, about absolutely nothing but just connecting.
I loved watching you try to get off Diet Coke.
I loved you giving me shit about Lars.
I loved our collaboration on machine Gun preacher.
i love that you recorded those songs in your closet.
I love that you gave me the songs that you didn’t put in the movie.
I love what you brought to my life.

Your last damn text to me was a 90’s picture of Lars with a note stenciled in pink by you saying “I love you Coop, call me, best Lars”

I will always wonder now if there was more I could have done.
There was a fragility.
There was a purity.
You changed the world.
You made people FEEL.
Your heart matched your voice which matched your love for your Vicky and beautiful children.

You are the highway.

You are the shadow on the sun.

You are the stone

You were a DIAMOND.

I will never forget you and carry you in my heart.
The world was lucky to have had you in its orbit or rather we, in your orbit.

Every time I want to feel something, I take a drive, usually on Mulholland. When i need to fucking FEEL something. And it ALWAYS has been and will forever be YOU, that will bring me there….. the windows go down, the sunroof opens, the driver’s seat slips back , I AM THE HIGHWAY GOES ON, and then a slow, languid, warm, syrupy, proud smile forms and within one second, HEAVEN. I am free. Everything is ok.

Today, its not ok. You left too early.
We are all heartbroken and also grateful to have had your spirit and soul indelibly imprint us.

We love you and always will.
Your spirit lives beautifully in the eyes and souls of your wife and beautiful children.
We will love them and support them and forever cherish what you gave us and this world.
Love you friend……

Coop

Chester Bennington

I dreamt about the Beatles last night. I woke up with Rocky Raccoon playing in my head and a concerned look on my wife’s face. She told me my friend had just passed away. Thoughts of you flooded my mind and I wept. I’m still weeping, with sadness, as well as gratitude for having shared some very special moments with you and your beautiful family. You have inspired me in many ways you could never have known. Your talent was pure and unrivaled. Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that’s what we all are. You helped me understand that. I just watched a video of you singing “A Day In The Life” by the Beatles and thought of my dream. I’d like to think you were saying goodbye in your own way. I can’t imagine a world without you in it. I pray you find peace in the next life. I send my love to your wife and children, friends and family.
Thank you for allowing me to be part of your life.

With all my love.

Your friend,
Chester

June 5, 2017

Josh Brolin

Everywhere I look, I think I see Chris walking toward me: tall, a long mane of lion curls, a slight smile under either a beard or a pencil thin mustache.

Every time I look at my phone and it says Christopher and I think it’s all been a dream, something imagined, that you create subconsciously so that it can never be realized.

Every time I think of Chris, it’s like he’s in front of me, telling me what he’s been doing: his kids, Vicky, a fair they went to, or how much fun he had when we all went karting, a song he’s mining the magic out of.

This is the thing that never goes away, the impact someone has on you. It will ebb and flow with time in its intensity, but it will always be there until someone is doing it about you.

An impact. That’s what we all hope to have: a great memory, a witticism, a song, how they deal with their children, moments, when in repose, they call you to just say “Hey, man, I miss you”.

Chris Cornell touched on happy, his kind of grace. We all have our own happy. He’d ridden his various treacherous roads on the psychic motorcycle rebelling, reacting, rebounding, etc. And now, older, familied, this was a time of just working on himself, said family, a deeper music and how to pull for more love out it all. His was an uphill climbing trajectory. There’s the professional, yeah, that too, but people don’t die professionally, they only die personally. And personally, was an uphill climb — a winded climb, just by nature of his sensitivity — but uphill nonetheless.

Chris Cornell the human being.
Chris Cornell who loved his family: Vicky, Lilli, Toni and Christopher.
Chris Cornell who was my friend: simply, my friend.

I met Chris at the Hollywood Café. I was drunk, and afterward, backstage, sat on his lap and told him how great I thought he was. He smiled, I’m sure a little irritated, but let me pontificate until I felt he had really heard how deeply he had affected me. I had a tendency to be fairly aggressive toward the things that moved me, and Chris, from the moment I heard him live (so intimate, as only he could be), grabbed each of my cells by the throat and never let go.

Chris Cornell was my friend: simply. It came from the music sure, the way his voice reached out like ET’s finger, but it was the lap dance I gave him that set it all in motion.

Over the next 7 years, Chris and I became close. I got him: the isolation, the love and tension to create, the elation of finding the love of your life and manifesting a happier life with that love, and he got me. Our lives paralleled and with that a loose friendship came true intimacy and reveal.

When you are well known for your chosen profession you have a tendency to protect yourself. You wall off and deny that people are talking about you. You know how to deflect conversations. You start to question if you know anymore what a general openness looks like.

Then, if you are diligent, if you care about your personal legacy, you fight for that intimacy.

When I told Chris that Kathryn and I were getting married he sent me a song that he had written for Vicky after they first got together, a song that he was going to sing at our wedding. His quote:

“I started writing this song years ago right after I met Vicky. I sang an early version to her over the phone before we were engaged but I felt for years that I hadn’t distilled all of the magic I felt with her into song form. About a month ago I finished it. This version played into a hundred dollar mic seems to be the only way to capture the hugeness of how I feel about her.

I was thinking recently that you might relate to it. 

Big hugs to you both!
C”

Kathryn and I listened to the song just as we had listened to another of Chris’s songs early in our relationship, both of us with tears.
Once in a while someone comes along in your life who just oozes personal. You share inspirations, values, desires, wishes, hopes, like a teenage journal, hoping it will one day answer back to you.

My buddy Chris answered back.
Chris Cornell, the human being.
“Hey, man. I’m just calling to say I miss you.”

The other day I started pulling up all the emails, all the voicemails, and just gazing into the memories of different conversations, moments, milestones. My wife and I listened to him sing “Happy Birthday” on my voicemail. “Happy Birthday dear yoooouuuuu. Happy Birthday to you. I love you, man”…click.

You live a life, and to be grateful for that life lived is having lived. Chris Cornell was a human being and like all human beings, we have an expiration date; all different than one another: May 18th, 2017 was his.

But Chris will always be in my heart. I will hold him not high, not angrily, but face to face, like we were, supporting each other through this wacky, circus tent of a life.

There was a moment he wrote to me years ago, and it’s a moment I’d like to share with you. It speaks beautifully for itself as to who he was: a sensitive, protective warrior of a father. What the human aspect of everything meant to him. How he just wanted all of us to find common ground and appreciate this gift that we have for just the little while we’ve been given it.

“JB — Thought of you again today. We live above Benedict Canyon and my daughter’s Parrot flew out of a window and down over the canyon. Hoping he wouldn’t die, I dressed up like Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet and headed down into the wilds of the canyon. As I descended, I saw a female bluebird in a distant tree. Thought it was mine. I chased it around until I saw she was nesting and wasn’t in fact green.

I spent the next 2 hours in the screaming sun alternately crashing thru brush and sitting still so I’d be able to vibe out his spot. Decided it was too big a canyon and I would never find him. I cut back up behind my house and sat in the shade near where the bush whacking started.

I sat there for a half hour feeling like I betrayed a little friend who relied on me for his safety.

I waited another few minutes and gave up. I paused for one second before going inside and tried one last time to chirp for him. I waited and listened, and suddenly I heard a faint chirp back down in the brush. There he was! Wanting very much to be rescued. Little green birds that talk are the needles in the haystacks formed of needles on top of a bed of a valley of needles.

But they sometimes chirp.”

Brother, you are near, you are dear, and I’ll see you when it’s time. But for now, my heart billows and embraces everything that you were, that you are, that you forever will be. I hear you “in the haystack formed of needles/ on top of a bed of a valley of needles/ but I hear you/ and know that you are there”. Yes, I know that you are there. I’ll miss you, but I know that you are there.

JOSH BROLIN

June 4, 2017

Peter Cornell

FRIENDS:

It’s been difficult to put words together. My heart is broken. Chris was always just my brother. We just “were”. No pretense. No dog and pony show. We didn’t have to get deep all the time. Sometimes we only needed to just be in the same room and just be present. That was enough.

It wasn’t until this week, it really hit me how he belonged to the world. That he is an icon and a legend. That being said, I am so sorry to YOU for your loss. Artists, actors, musicians. We rely on these people to lift us up. To inspire us and distract us in times of trouble. Chris protected us when we needed him to. His one of a kind-ness surrounded us like a suit of armor. He was a warrior and a wizard. A howling wolf and a trusted mentor.

My brother gave freely of his gifts and it was never a struggle. He kept himself from the saturation of celebrity in such a humble way. The power and anger and passion of my brother’s music was always genuine, original and legitimate. He was the powerful, sensitive, fragile, angry, mystical creature that will exist forever in his body of work. And he did it for ALL of us. Giving it away. Leaving all on the stage or in the recordings that will keep him immortal.

I will never wrap my head around his passing. I’ve been in shock since I heard the news. I can’t and won’t let him go.

Please know, with all the humility I can muster from the depths of a pulverized heart, I THANK EACH OF YOU for your kindness and condolences. THANK YOU for finding me through YOUR tears.

Hold your brothers close.
Much Love!

PC

June 1, 2017

Vicky Cornell

I met you on a starry Paris night at Hotel Plaza Athenee after we were called to arrange Audioslave’s under the radar after show party for the following night. I remember being introduced to you and how your eyes pierced through me.

You had the show the next day, and I did not attend. I met up with everyone at your after party, and when you realized I wasn’t at the show, you dryly asked, “Well, where were you… out having a sandwich?” A bunch of us sat, and I recall you ordering foie gras and me asking if you were sure you knew what you were ordering. You always had such elegant taste.

A friend asked who was the most beautiful girl at L’Avenue, and you got up in front of everyone, looked all around, came back,  and you pointed at me. We talked that night until the sun came up, and it was time for you to leave for the next city. You called me the very next day, and 3 days, later we found ourselves together in London.

I remember how you ran in, fearful I had left because you were late from Zane Lowe’s show, and you were meeting me for tea time. At the time, I thought I needed to be careful and tried to distance my heart from falling in love with you… but you didn’t let that happen, and you zigzagged back and forth across the world to visit me. You were permanently jet-lagged because you couldn’t bear our time away from each other.

I finally came to visit you in New York on the 2003 Lollapalooza tour and threw your 39th birthday party. A few weeks later, I was on Mykonos, and you were still on Lollapalooza singing to me over the phone, “oh sweet Ms Vicky, won’t you come and marry me.”

I didn’t know what to think other than I loved you, and I was all in.

I flew to LA with my mom the day before my birthday in August. You gave me the most beautiful surprises from flowers, candles, and balloons everywhere to wrapped boxes of all shapes and sizes like it was Christmas. You made me feel like a princess.

You moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel because I was staying there. You woke up one morning doing flips on the bed. You asked me to come sit with you, and you said you had to take your necklace back. I thought, “No… why?” but you proceeded to cut it off and take the silver ring that was on it and said, “I woke up and I had the strangest vision of doing this. I’m not prepared with the real ring, but I want to marry you.” The ring fit perfectly, and while you surprised me with a Harry Winston several weeks later, I could not bear to take it off, and I used it as my wedding band.  The two always represented how different you and I were but how perfectly we fit together.

I remember doing the civil wedding and how you cried. I had never met such a sensitive and special man.

We had our beautiful babies, and you were convinced we were soulmates, and that you had been looking for me. I’m so happy you found me. I’m so happy for the nearly 14 and a half years we spent together. We did everything together, literally, everything. You were my best friend, and when I wasn’t out on tour, we were on the phone at least 4 hours a day.

You were the best father, husband, and son-in-law to my parents. Your patience, empathy, and love always shone through.

You had always said I saved you. You wouldn’t be alive if it were not for me. My heart gleamed to see you happy living and motivated. Excited for life. Doing everything you can to give back. We had the time of our lives in the last decade, and I’m sorry my sweet love that I did not see what happened to you that night, I’m sorry you were alone, and I know that was NOT you my sweet Christopher. Your children know that too so you can Rest In Peace.

I am broken, but I will stand up for you, and I will take care of our beautiful babies. I will think of you every minute of every day, and I will fight for you. You were right when you said we are soulmates. It has been said that paths that have crossed will cross again, and I know that you will come find me, and I will be here waiting.

I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of loving and more than anyone ever will.

Always and forever,
Your Vicky