From Depression to “Helena.”

Picture of Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. Flickr user Michael Spencer, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The first time I tried to commit suicide I was ten years old. Ten year olds don’t know how to commit suicide though, at least usually not well, so I went to the kitchen and tried to overdose on vitamins and a few ibuprofen and then went to my bed to go “die in my sleep.” Rookie move. 

Part of the reason for what drove me to such an attempt so young was my overwhelming grief. I had a lot of grief. Some of it was because I lost my friend and crush before third grade even began. I felt like a part of myself died with him. Before he died, I had a lot of hope he would live. I believed in all of the town’s prayers, all of the fundraiser money raised for his chemotherapy for the brain cancer, and all the TV movies spouting miracles do happen. Even when he died, I was at the funeral hoping he’d sit up in his coffin and be confused why everyone woke him up from his nap, or that God let him come back after temporarily being dead. When he died and didn’t rise from his coffin, that crushed the innocent, hopeful side of me and it changed me as a person. When I went back to school, I felt like I forgot how to act, and started getting bullied. In 5th grade the bullying was at its peak and it felt like the teacher joined in too. I wasn’t just grieving him anymore, I was grieving myself and how I felt I lost myself when he was lowered into the ground. My soul was covered in dirt like his coffin being covered by mounds of earth too. I was in that grave too. That is what drove me to the cold tiles of my kitchen looking for pills and then laying in my bunk bed hoping to join him. 

When I woke up groggy from my nap, instead of waking up in the afterlife, I cried and had grief of myself before I ever attempted. Every subsequent suicide attempt throughout the years killed apart of me and I grieved the person I could have been. I grieved all of the trauma happening to me that made me feel like not a fully, rounded person I wanted to be. I grieved when I’d see a glimpse of a good father-daughter relationship in public at Outback Steakhouse or the mall, I grieved how I couldn’t get any enjoyment in the beauty anymore sitting on the beach at Wildwood, and I grieved how I messed up by deciding to bottle up my emotions on purpose in 5th grade when I was ten years old trying to commit suicide instead of crying. 

“Helena” from My Chemical Romance came out a while before I would ever listen to it. It was released as a single for the album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, on March 8th, 2005 and was produced by Howard Benson. I was still in diapers, just barely a year old. Despite that fact, the song touched me when I discovered it several years later in 2014.

Helena is one of those songs with the perfect mixture of heavier instruments and heart wrenching lyrics. It’s the perfect track for someone who doesn’t feel heard enough by a sad country or pop music ballad, which are good, but feels tame in comparison to the intense emotions of grief and heartache. That is one of the reasons the song Helena captured the heart of many who first stumbled across the song on MySpace, or finally saw the song on MTV after it became one of the most requested rock music videos of the early 2000s. Helena could have contributed to why emo music became so popular for the period. 

The persona of the singer Gerard Way in the song is going through the stages of grief throughout it. At first, he is whispering as he sings “Long ago / Just like the Hearse you die to get in again / We are so far from you.” He sounds like he is not allowing his grief to be heard yet and is grappling with being so far away from the person or symbolic personification of something he is grieving. The whispers are like the soft toned whispers at a funeral or somewhere public, where it is generally not appropriate to let yourself sob your eyes out, even if others are feeling such turmoil as well. The guitar in the background is also quieted while he sings quietly. He breaks this quieter expectation or act while he belts out the lines “Burning on / Just like the match you strike to incinerate / The lives of everyone you know” with an emotional sadness and anger behind it. The guitar and drums come into full effect to give the track a punk feel. 

The singer is very emotionally distraught as the song goes on, talking about how what he lost is “And like a blade you’ll stain / Well, I’ve been holding on tonight.” He does not want to let or accept that he will never see this person again. This lyric also has possible dark double meeting with self harm, as those that cut themselves stain blades as their coping mechanism to survive life, even though it is a negative and dangerous coping mechanism. Gerard the singer is struggling to hold on to this person, and to hold on to himself in the process. He goes through the stage of grief of bargaining as he begs to be able to be heard from the person with the lyrics “Can you hear me? / Are you near me?” He wants to still be able to communicate with this person or symbolic person even if they are dead or inaccessible anymore. He also begs to be able to see them again, and seems to be holding out hope that in the afterlife they can with the lyrics “Can we pretend to leave and then / We’ll meet again / When both our cars collide.” This suggests he is in the bargaining stage of grief and his voice is edited to sound far away and distant like the person he lost in this segment.

Gerard Way doesn’t come to a full acceptance of the death of his person, saying goodnight instead of goodbye. However, by the end there is a sliver of hope or a sliver of acceptance. He is able to say goodnight to this person and he accepts that it is better for him to stay where he is. He sings “Things are better if I stay / So long and goodnight / So long and goodnight” and acknowledges he is in this separate place from them. While in the beginning he is angry and upset and bargaining for this person back, by the end he is able to reassure himself that it is a goodnight for them and that he needs to stay where he is. 

The music video keeps to this theme as well. The music video, filmed in the Immanuel Presbyterian Church and directed by Marc Webb, shows Gerard Way at a funeral for a dead woman played by Tracy Phillips. Gerard Way and everyone in the music video is dressed in all black. Gerard has heavy make up around his eyes and his hair is in a classically black emo fringe. He is at first behaving in a docile manner at the funeral, but then he bursts out in the song and begins to emotionally shake as he is singing the music. The other attendees at the funeral, played by fans, begin dancing in the church pews and Gerard directs them in movement. He looks to be on the verge of tears and he emotionally shakes his arms and has dramatic, pained expressions. 

In the middle of the song, the dead woman rises from her coffin and dances down the church aisles. This suggests the hope Gerard has to see this person again and to meet them again at their funeral. She dances and pulls the camera in before finally collapsing back into her coffin again. The band members take her coffin out in the rain and walk her towards the hearse. As they are carrying her out, other funeral attendees dance with umbrellas and Gerard’s face cries out as he says a final goodnight to her. The music video ends with the band members placing her inside of the hearse and Gerard closes the door on her. He takes one final look at the coffin inside, and then turns away. This highlights some of the themes of the start of accepting life with his person being gone, as this is his goodnight to her. He is still not healed, and he is still not fully accepting it as he is just saying goodnight to her, but the closing of the doors and walking away suggests a better resolution within himself is starting. 

I found this song by mistake through my YouTube suggestions. In fifth grade I started listening to a lot of sad tracks off a pop album. The depressing pop or country ballad in a mix of upbeat songs I heard on the radio. I found another band, Panic! At the Disco, which at the time was less like a band and more like just the Brendon Urie show during this time as well. Early P!ATD was considered emo, but I was listening to “Girls/Girls/Boys” or “Miss Jackson,” not “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” yet. Helena by My Chemical Romance was constantly being recommended to me. The music video with Gerard’s beautifully feminine, fringed black hair. At one point, I clicked on it. I heard Gerard’s whisper voice and then the sudden explosion of noise and emotion come through my shitty speakers. I was hooked. 

I was still bottling up all these emotions, and still battling with the grief I felt. The grief and the depression I was searching for in all of those sad pop ballads never felt answered to enough. No song felt sad enough for me: the weird girl, who had to go see the guidance counselor Mr. Lucas every week it felt like. The girl who lost her identity and how to act with losing the sweet boy so soon, the girl who couldn’t find beauty in rainbows anymore, the girl who felt alone and felt invisible to everyone, and the girl who tried to commit suicide so early and failed. 

Helena felt like the answer to all of that grief. My depression, my suicidal ideation, and my grief both figuratively and literally paralleled that to the grief of the character Gerard Way was playing in Helena. This song made me feel all of these emotions in a healthy manner. While it made me sad and morbid to listen to it, it wasn’t in a way to dwell on negative emotions. It was a way to acknowledge them in his emotional, powerful voice. The instruments and the vocals matched the loudness I craved and needed in order to quell my own depression. It’d quiet the negativity when I’d blast it in my cat girl headphones on the way to school. I would say so long and goodnight to all I was feeling, to all the ways I felt depression changed me. I would let myself mourn my older self with this song and to acknowledge it was better for me to stay even with this depressed version of me. I would listen to this song and it could make me cry, which is what I’d so desperately need. It gave me a space to feel this grief, to feel as angry as Gerard Way at the funeral in Helena. 

It was a way to feel my grief for three minutes and thirty seconds. To truly acknowledge that depression. For as long as I looped it. 

An added bonus was how I found community from becoming a My Chemical Romance fan after listening to all their songs after this one. It wouldn’t have been possible without Helena to truly walk into a Hot Topic for the first time. It wouldn’t have been possible to find my friends from middle school: the quirky, weird people who also belted out My Chemical Romance at the lunch table and fake cried at the infamous G Note meme associated with a different MCR track. I found Dan and Phil, considered part of what an emo kid in 2015 would watch on YouTube, and got to meet them once. I listened to old P!ATD, old Fall Out Boy, and eventually found more “metal” bands (an angry metalhead on Reddit may disagree) like Get Scared, Bring Me the Horizons, Ice Nine Kills, and even the Japanese kawaii-metal band BABYMETAL. None of that would have been possible for me to do without finding Helena that day, which is still my favorite My Chemical Romance song.

I embodied how My Chemical Romance encourages you to be yourself even if you are an isolated loser throughout my entire adolescence and early parts of college life. The introduction to alternative culture because of my strong connection to Helena changed me from how it allowed me to feel and how allowing me to feel and parallel Gerard Way’s grief ended up making me a whole person outside of depression by giving me a chance for community. 

Helena isn’t just a song about grief, it embodies the truth of grief itself. The ugly, emotional bits of it. That is why it is such a powerful song to me and others who heard it originally back in 2005. The people I’ve learned and eventually found because of how much this song meant to them, whether originally in 2005 or much later like I found it. 

I appreciate Helena for being able to feel that grief, and let it out in a healthy way, whenever I need to. Helena and My Chemical Romance in general enabled me to become the person I am. To truly live as myself. To truly feel my own grief. ”So Long and Goodnight” to the girl alone looking for a way out and not having anyone. I can say goodnight to and acknowledge my old self before depression and feel some hope after hearing Helena. I get to finally see them in concert this summer when our cars collide in Philadelphia, and I am so thankful Helena helped bring me to a place where I can make it to my twenties with a solid and better understanding of myself, my emotions, and depression, and see them in person in concert as a bonus with other former emo kids like myself. I found that slither of positive change in Helena. I found the positive in the goodnights Gerard repeated. As Gerard Way said:

So Long and Goodnight. Forever.