#84 Celebrity Suicide Notes - Sonny Bono

Mr Sweet Boy John,

It is Monday January 5th 1998 and I don't know when you'll receive this note, if ever, but nevertheless it is important to write, even if it ends floating in the Salton sea or flogged in some macabre memorabilia store that us yanks love so much. It doesn't matter, what matters is that I get certain things off my chest before I ski myself into a tree. Pathetic, I know, but it must look like an accident – my life insurance policy is invalidated by suicide.

John, I have been a father, four times, but never a good one. I was neglectful and selfish and unloving. Little bits of myself I treated like shit because they demanded more of me than they already had. But my neglect, hatred of a certain child, is a kind of guilt that has fostered and fermented inside me. Now I am drunk on my own conscience, it's like I am my own eco-system of poison from which I cannot escape. And I have lived and sinned long enough to realize that there is no redemption, that redemption is just the first stage of one's eternal punishment. Nobody has ever quite realized that, but I have!

Was a queer child my fault? Is it a guilt I must carry and let destroy me? Well no, but making that child even queerer, abusing it while it swam in a sea of confusion now seems like the worst torture I could have inflicted upon it. I did nothing to 'heal' it, only pushed it deeper into a world of homosexual depravity, and of course, that child being a part of me, well... are my child's sins also mine? In many ways yes. A parents main influence is an invisible one. It lays behind discipline and nice homes and money and etiquette. There is also the aura of the parent, like an album, a feel/atmosphere which that person gives off. When I close my eyes and think of my aura it is dark and looming and scary and oppressing – there is not one single watt of love which shines through.

But what am I saying here??? I don't even know. What I know is that in many ways you resemble my transgender child, and by writing all this to you it almost feels like I am writing it to him. It is an apology from the grave, but not an apology of who you are or what I made you, but an apology of me, my behaviour and faults. I cannot change the past, but I can affect the future, unfortunately not with me in it.

So I will leave now. There are a set of skis, hard fast snow, and a tree waiting for me. If my calculations are even half correct by the time anyone/you reads this note my head will be pushed inside my chest cavity and I will be frozen stiff somewhere on the Nevada side of the Heavenly Ski Resort.

Please keep yourself well, I will die less painfully knowing that someone like you exists somewhere in this world. For a long time now your beauty is all I have survived on, but now even that fades. Not you, of course, but me. You will be an eternal star. One that shines so bright that all the other stars seem dull...

I love YOU so much sweetheart, please return to me one day... I beg you!!!

Until we meet again, Sonny B. XxX