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By now, those of you who watch or read the news have probably heard that WWE Superstar Chris Benoit apparently murdered his wife and seven year-old son over this past weekend before hanging himself yesterday. If not, the grisly details can be found here and here.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever, and not just because it’s the very definition of a “senseless tragedy.” To those of us who followed the industry, Benoit always came across as the quintessential everyman who appreciated everything he achieved over the course of a spectacular career, a guy who worked hard for everything he had and was rewarded for his dedication. And to hear those who knew him speak of him, it’s even harder to imagine how something like this could have happened. Last night’s episode of WWE Raw was dedicated to remembering Benoit, and the only information the police had revealed prior to its broadcast was that Benoit and his family were found dead in their home. One after another, Benoit’s friends and colleagues recounted how hard-working he was, how completely dedicated he was to his career and to his family and how much he loved his children.

To think about those tributes now, in light of what has come out since then, just makes this even more incomprehensible. Words literally fail. There’s no way to explain why my predominant feeling is deep sadness and not anger. The closest I can get to it is to talk about what an amazing and inspiring performer he was, and how ludicrous does that sound? How many people remember OJ Simpson primarily as a legendary football player?

The only thing that makes even the slightest amount of sense to me is his suicide. It doesn’t make things right, and it doesn’t make this any easier to accept. But all I can imagine is that he was in the grip of something cold and dark that found a weakness in him and sunk its claws in. I have to think that he was not in his right mind, because I don’t want to believe that anyone could be capable of something like that while retaining any semblance of sanity. And I have to think that, in a moment of clarity, he realized what he had done and knew that it was something that he could not possibly live with. He didn’t try to duck responsibility for it by hiring a team of lawyers to pick apart the forensic evidence, or by pleading temporary insanity, which he almost certainly must have been suffering from. He passed judgment on himself and decided that this was a world that could no longer have someone in it who had done what he had done.

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believe that everything you will ever do is done between the moments of your birth and death. And I believe that your life exists in a sort of permanence, even though you can only perceive it as going by one second at a time. The writer Alan Moore shares a similar belief and once said that, if that’s true, then no one should do anything that they can’t live with forever.

So for those who think that Chris Benoit deserves to burn in hell for all of eternity for what he did, imagine being eternally condemned to live a life that ends the way that his did, in the grip of a despair so all-encompassing that you literally cannot allow yourself to draw another breath. And for those of us who can’t bring ourselves to vilify someone who we once admired so greatly, at least there’s a hope that, in some form, the many qualities that made him so worthy of respect live on eternally, untainted by his monstrous, tragic end.