Pete Ham Memorial For The Badfinger Star, Suicide Victim This April 2013
I don't want to unload on Pete Ham about suicide, people do what they do and it is too late to really worry about it too much. But I have spent all Thanksgiving dealing with a friend of mine texting me, calling me, telling me how she has all these pills and wants to kill herself. It is wearying, worrying and bad news. And dangerous. On some level at some point, you just want to say do it already.
Ham is the wonderful Badfinger singer songwriter behind "Come And Get It", "Day After Day" "No Matter What" and even the Nilsson standard "Without You". He recorded for Apple Records and later signed to Warner Brothers where his manager used money left in escrow by Warner Brothers and the label pulled marketing monies off their newly released album. A couple of weeks before his 28th birthday and one month before his daughter was born in 1975.
Now a plaque honoring Ham will be placed in his home town Swansea according to contactmusic.com: "Tragic Badfinger star Pete Ham is to be remembered with a special blue plaque in his Welsh hometown.The tribute, which is traditionally placed at significant historical sites across Britain, will be unveiled at a ceremony in Swansea on 27 April (13) by the rocker's daughter Petera Ham"
His daughter said: ""I miss my father every day and I know that he will be there at the event looking down on family and friends, as they sit in his beautiful Swansea and listen to his music and honor his memory. I'm honored to represent my father at the event and I'd like to thank Swansea council for the beautiful memorial plaque that they will install in honor of him."
Okay, let's look at Ham for a moment. His daughter, who never met him, thinks of him every day. How sad is that? What a terrible, terrible mistake. If all life had left to bring him, and obviously Badfinger could be playing today if they wanted to, it was a problem but it would have been fixed, if all it had left was this one girl, it was more than enough to keep living. But he couldn't do it, he couldn't sustain his sanity.
Suicide is insanity. I mean, not always, there is some grief that can't be lived with, and some pain that can't be lived with, but otherwise ending your life is a terrible, hateful, selfish and stupid act. Whatever life might not be , it is interesting, and you have the right to be alive and nobody, not even you, can take it away. If people love you, you have a responsibility to them, and if NO ONE LOVES YOU, you have a responsibility to yourself to fight for what is your right in the face of hatred and indifference.
Look at Cobain's daughter, look at Ham. Look what these daughters missed because their father's were selfish.
Look at it this way: 6 million years have gone by without your consciousness, and 6 million more will go by without your consciousness. For fuck's sake tough it out for the 100 years you are conscious.
