Anthony Bourdain was funny, adventurous, and an excellent writer. One of my very favorites.

Word is he also made excellent French fries and a tasty Coq au vin. His diverse work was so often downright enjoyable.

What’s always separated him, however, was his courage. Bourdain managed to create volumes of popular and far-reaching work that brought largely ignored but crucially important subjects to the foreground.

That took skill, and it took guts. As entertaining as he was on the page and on the screen, or through the characters he wrote for or stories he narrated, Bourdain’s ideas, words, and work is, first and foremost, important.

Bourdain showed you a delicious looking Southeast Asian dish you’d never heard of being prepared traditionally and brought to life, and then segued into reminding us (teaching many of us for the first time, I’m sure) how, Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in the history of the world, thanks to the sins of the United States.

It wasn’t enough for Bourdain to bring his viewers and readers to a Mexican border town to enjoy authentic tacos, he also insisted on showing the lives and people who made them, underscoring the humanity of immigrants, documented and undocumented alike, on whose backs this nation was built and through whose blood and sweat we still run, but who often receive little more in return than abuse and vilification.

Bourdain didn’t just discover delicious food for himself in lands far-off from his own home, he showed the food’s connection to people, culture, history, and often times in a way that forced a reckoning with the devastation of American imperialism.

Again, to make that project entertaining took skill. To embark on it at all while easier paths to celebrity and more convenient narratives abound, took courage.

Anthony Bourdain was kind to people he met. He was interested in them.

People’s lives, tastes, ideas, and struggles mattered to him. His own life seemed to begin to matter more to him as well, in recent years.

He stopped abusing drugs, ate healthier, took up and seriously competed in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

He was a sharer of goodness. Everything Anthony Bourdain enjoyed, he advocated passionately for.

Everything Bourdain thought was bad for mankind, whether it was racism, sexual abuse, or bad restaurants in Times Square, he exposed and warned us all against.

Bourdain, it seemed from afar, saw the world for what it is, what it has to offer, what it provides its people, and what we all do to and for the planet and one another. Often, what he saw was wondrous, inspiring.

Still other times it was cruel, devastating, and without redeeming value.

Bourdain saw it all. He also contributed so much.

If, after all of that, he felt so alone and sad that he thought life wasn’t worth living any longer, I don’t know what that means.

I don’t know what that means for society. I don’t know what that means for any of us who could only hope to see things as keenly as he, who aspire to his bravery, who sought to live with such earnest curiosity, and excited devotion, to living, to exploration, and to greater truths.

I only know that Anthony Bourdain was loved. That Anthony Bourdain mattered and made a real, sizeable and positive impact on the world around him.

I know that Tony achieved greatness, while remaining good, and that he certainly was not such a bad bastard after all.

Image courtesy of FloGrappling.