Rock N Roll Suicide: Donny Hathaway (1945-1979)

The story of the suicide’s life inevitably begins at the end. The life itself forever exists in the shadow of death, every detail a crumb leading back to the foregone conclusion.

Donny Hathaway fell from the window of his 15th floor room at New York’s’ Essex House Hotel on January 13, 1979. He was 33. Despite being ruled a suicide by the coroner, many of his family and friends believe it might have just been an accident. It is, of course, not uncommon for those closest to the deceased to resist the notion that their loved one killed themselves. Such an admission leads to uncomfortable questions of complicity: why didn’t I see the signs? what more could I have done? These painful queries are one of the many burdens that the suicide leaves behind. Sometimes that’s the point and sometimes those questions are the unintended consequences of ending one’s suffering. It is no wonder that some suicides leave no note and do their best to make their death look unintentional. Creating the illusion of an accident can be a gift to those you love. After all, accidents exist in a vacuum, but suicides never do.

While seemingly odd that the safety glass had been meticulously removed and was on the bed, apparently hanging out of windows was not out of character for Donny Hathaway. He had repeatedly drawn the ire of hotel managers that did not appreciate his habit of singing in his room, so he would simply open the window and sing into the wind. He was also in the midst of a career resurgence at the time. Why kill himself now? his friends and family wondered. His song “The Closer I Get to You,” which he recorded with Roberta Flack, had been nominated for a Grammy and charted at number 2. If his friends and family pointed to his success as a reason why he didn’t kill himself, perhaps they never fully understood the nature of his precarious mental state. In the wake of his triumphant solo 1970 debut Everything is Everything (which included his classic “The Ghetto”), Hathaway was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. It’s a devastating condition, one that was little understood at the time. Medications were primitive and like so many paranoid schizophrenics, he quit taking the pills whenever he thought he was better, only to further tailspin into the darkness. He spent time in and out of mental institutions and he frequently spoke of suicide.

Success is not a balm for emotional turmoil and perhaps Hathaway came to fully realize the polarizingly hollow nature of fame when he experienced it the second time around. Or he may have been simply beyond caring. It is impossible to make sense of the motivations of those inflicted with this crippling disease, we only have their behavior to decipher. Certainly, his fragile and disturbed mental condition had a lot to do with his artistic split from Roberta Flack in 1973 (their 1972 album of duets had spawned three huge hits) and by all accounts, he spent the subsequent five years deeply broken and disturbed. Upon reconciling with Flack in 1978, he quickly found himself back on top, but he may very well have felt more isolated and alone than he had ever been.

“A Song For You” off his 1971 album “Donny Hathaway.”

Donny Hathaway – A Song For You MP3

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