I kinda feel it would be remiss to not mention Shinee's Jonghyun committing suicide at age 27 last week. I'm not a fan of K-pop boy groups, but I am aware of them and respect a bunch, especially one of the original top groups of the second Hallyu wave.

I am familiar with the names of all five Shinee members. I have seen their promotion performances on music shows and acknowledge they are amazing, charismatic and talented. I knew Jonghyun also wrote songs for Shinee and other singers. It's a short list of K-pop idols who also write. When I find that an idol also writes, they get a gold star next to their name for creativity. They create.

My reaction to the news was probably very typical and of normative nature. Disbelief, terrible loss, tragic. He was young, famous, adored, talented. He had it made. He had made it. His suicide was felt far and wide, and more than he could likely contemplate. He was a public figure. He had responsibilities. Why?!

Since then it has come to light that he had been fighting depression his entire life and it finally overwhelmed him. There was nothing vain, cavalier or impulsive about his suicide. It wasn't the result of life circumstances that would likely have changed if he just lived on. He wasn't distraught over some tangible thing and went home and hanged himself like others have. He was and always has been in the middle of a dark storm that few people can even imagine. And it wasn't going to go away. Ever. He would eventually have been consumed by it.

Usually I hate the cliche platitude the living use to comfort themselves saying the dead have gone to a "better place". Not that anyone has said that about Jonghyun, but I would be alright with it if they did. It is a good description. He has gone to a better place: Not here.

He meant to do it. It wasn't what I call a "suicidal gesture" whereby a door is left open to be rescued. He meant to do it despite a final text message to his sister who did promptly inform the police.

Usually I would consider that kind of act a call for help with an unconscious half-expectation to be saved. His final text wasn't that. I believe he had no expectation or desire to be rescued.

It was partly a definitive good-bye, but it may have also served a practical purpose given the way he did it. He burned charcoal in a frying pan releasing deadly concentrations of carbon monoxide. The text also served as an alert so that someone would arrive, not to save him, but to turn off the burner and air out the CO so that no one else would be harmed.

It's anyone's guess whether he actually thought of that. Considering the information reported, I would bet that he did. He would have run the scenario in his mind and noticed the danger to other people and taken measures so that others weren't harmed. That fits with the profile of the type of person he was.

That would also answer a question I had about how his sister knew where to send the police. He didn't do it at home, he had rented a short-term apartment for the purpose.

Renting the apartment wouldn't have raised bells. On a most simplistic level he could just tell people he needed a fresh space to write. But then why give his sister the address? Anyone could contact him by phone. The only reason would be the expectation that someone would need to go there.

There are actually plenty of other reasons why she would've known, maybe she had even been there, but basically, dispelling all suspicion, she had it because he gave it to her. It could've been a totally innocuous message saying that he was renting a place so he could write, here's the address if anyone needs me. She would have read it and not thought it suspicious that he was including an address, but there it is planted. It is in the range of suicides to think like that.

Why he rented a place to do it and didn't do it at home is also something we will never know but also goes into the mind of a suicide. It suggests this wasn't spontaneous but planned over a period. There may be an element of separating and getting away from his familiar life. Suicidal thoughts was probably something he lived with, but renting the apartment was a definitive indication that he knew or decided now was the time. Specific reasons of his own we can't know.

Fans have noted other clues that could only be noticed as meaning anything in retrospect. He had a visible tattoo of a black dog that is a symbol for depression? That's news to me, but OK, the article explained it. Fans noted that at a recent broadcast he skipped a sentence that they could see displayed on his teleprompter mentioning his comeback in January. There are other possible reasons for it, but now it looks like he didn't mention it because he didn't expect to be around in January.

My going on and on about this displays the truism about suicide that it leaves more questions than answers. Details can be pondered, contemplated, analyzed, speculated upon, rocks thrown at, poetry written, statistics cited, Broadway shows composed, but we'll never know for sure.

I sympathize with Jonghyun. And I'm glad there has been a lack of public condemnation or judgment regarding his suicide. People seemed to grasp the true tragedy quite quickly, which is not merely that he committed suicide, but that he suffered so much to the point of committing suicide.

I can't say I was a fan, I don't have any Shinee in my music collection*, but I respected him and joined as one of the silent mourners around the world.

In that final text message Jonghyun sent to his sister, there is a phrase that has been translated in two different ways. Fans have latched onto the translation of him saying to his sister, "Tell me I did well". I think there's a very Korean nuance to it that I can't explain. Fans have responded en masse in their condolences telling him he did well. Same as me, it was probably the first thing they thought when they read that message in the news. You did well, Jonghyun.

* I do have several songs that Jonghyun penned for female singers in my collection. In fact, the day after he died, IU's "Gloomy Clock" written by and featuring him came up on my iPod Shuffle. The iPod was loaded the day before he died. That's a 2GB capacity iPod randomly selecting from a 100GB collection. That was one hell of a coincidence.