While the world is still raw from the news of Scott Weiland's death, the mother of his children cautioned fans from treating him like another tragic rock star hero.
In an open letter in Rolling Stone that is the literary equivalent of ripping off a Band-Aid, Mary Forsberg Weiland claimed that though the world lost the Stone Temple Pilots singer on 3 December, in a metaphorical sense at least, the Weiland she knew 'died' years ago.
He was survived by Noah, 15, and Lucy, 13, for whom he was reportedly a largely absent and well, pretty shitty father.
Though she doesn't want to "downplay Scott's amazing talent," Forsberg Weiland felt compelled to separate the man from the myth.
We have this tendency posthumously to romanticize addiction and illness. We quite happily brush under the carpet the mess of life, acting as though the art somehow justifies it.
And Forsberg Weiland is here to tell us it doesn't. And pretending otherwise is just not right.
Protecting and otherwise glorifying "what belongs in a hospital" in the name of art does no one any favours. It's something that as society we must take responsibility for.
For so long, Forsberg Weiland kept the pain to herself for the sake of her children. Now she has taken the opposite view and gone public about the struggle her family faced over the years.
"I knew they would one day see and feel everything that I'd been trying to shield them from, and that they'd eventually be brave enough to say, 'That mess was our father. We loved him, but a deep-rooted mix of love and disappointment made up the majority of our relationship with him,'" she wrote.
Weiland the musician was great. Weiland the father was a disaster, and that's the true tragedy. His family is angry and sad about the loss, understandably, and hopes we learn from his death and don't treat him like another Kurt Cobain.
"Let's choose to make this the first time we don't glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don't have to come with it. Skip the depressing T-shirt with 1967-2015 on it - use the money to take a kid to a ballgame or out for ice cream."
While I wholeheartedly agree, I don't think the details of his personal life - or that of any other celebrity or public figure for that matter - are any of my business. The only thing that is for public consumption is the music he created - the art, not the artist....
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