Chester Bennington‘s widow Talinda Bennington has spoken out on the warning signs the Linkin Park member showed before his death last year.
Bennington died in July last year at the age of 41. His death was later ruled as suicide.
Now, Talinda has explained how she has become “more educated” about the warning signs of those in danger of taking their own lives. “I am now more educated about those signs, but they were definitely there: the hopelessness, the change of behavior, isolation,” she told CNN.
“That was all part of our daily life. Sometimes, some signs were there more than others. Sometimes, they weren’t there at all,” she continued.
She explained how she and Chester were on holiday with their family before he flew back early to do a television commercial. “This was not a time where we or any of our family suspected this to happen, which is terrifying… We thought everything was okay,” she added.
Bennington was later found dead at the couple’s home in Palo Verdes Estates, California.
Earlier this month, Mike Shinoda spoke out about whether Linkin Park will continue without Bennington. “That’s the million-dollar question, right? And, unfortunately, I’ve said it before, but there aren’t any answers to that at this point. It would be awesome if there were. That would be really easy.”
“I wish we were in a Brian Johnson/Bon Scott situation where it’s, like, no, the guy, our best friend, who sang for the band who passed away, he literally said, ‘This is the guy,’ and we listened to the guy and the guy’s definitely the guy, and we all love hanging out with him, and we want to play with him.
“That didn’t happen to anybody else, really. That hasn’t happened to us,” he said, adding, “If somebody comes and says, ‘Hey, Linkin Park, do you want to play a show in Germany?’ then you have to have a discussion with all the guys, and you have one guy who’s, like, ‘I definitely don’t want to do it,’ and you have one guy who says, ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe we shouldn’t do it,’ and two guys who say, ‘We definitely need to do it,’ and then there’s concerns.
“All that noise, that is not something I can deal with right now, and it’s not a knock on anybody else. Any one of us could be the outlier opinion, the minority voice on something, but I definitely need some more simplicity in terms of decision making.”