Unknowable anguish

 Claude Lemieux was never cut out to be Mr. Nice Guy. If you'd handed him the NHL's Lady Byng Trophy for gentlemanly behavior, he'd likely have told you to stick it, and into what orifice, and with exactly how much force.

He grew up in Buckingham, Quebec, a mill town 24 miles north of Ottawa and 110 west of Montreal that was swallowed up by the city of Gastineau in the early Oughts. He died this week in Lake Park, Fla., just three days after serving as the honorary torch bearer in Montreal before Game 3 of the NHL Eastern Conference Finals between the Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes.

Police say his son found him in the back warehouse of a furniture store showroom in Lake Park, apparently dead by his own hand. He was 60 years old.

In passing he leaves a quirky sort of legacy from his years as a player, primarily with the Canadiens, the New Jersey Devils and the Colorado Avalanche: Clutch performer and (not to tiptoe around it) a genuine horse's ass.

In his 1,215 games in the NHL, he won four Stanley Cups -- one with the Habs, two with the Devils and one with the Avalanche -- and finished with 786 career points on 379 goals and 407 assists. In 1995, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP, leading the Avalanche to the Stanley Cup with 13 goals in 20 games.

Of course, along the way, he also delivered one of the all-time cheap shots in the Cup Final, running Kris Draper of the Red Wings from behind and leaving Draper with a fractured skull and a rearranged face. Because that was Lemieux, too.

On the ice, he was that annoying fly buzzing around your head, an agent provocateur who accumulated 1,777 penalty minutes in his career. If he played for your team, he was a hard-nosed guy who played hard-nosed hockey, because it's  hard-nosed game. But if he played for the other guys?

Well. Then he was just, you know, a horse's ass.

"A fierce competitor who rose to the occasion in big moments, Claude was a relentless, courageous and tenacious player who the team to the highest honors," Canadiens owner Geoff Molson eulogized.

To which opposing fans would no doubt reply, channeling The Dude in "The Big Lebowski": Well, that's just your opinion, man.

What is not opinion is he's gone now, and the "how" of it is is ineffably tragic. That's because, as is true so many times when someone takes his or her own life, there is no "why" to go with it at this point.

The signs may have all been there, leaving those who are left to deal with a grim emotional stew of guilt, grief and, yes, anger ("How could he/she do this?"). On the other hand, sometimes the signs are not there. Sometimes hard-nosed guys are too hard-nosed, and shielding whatever is churning inside them in the armor they've built up across the years. .

Claude Lemieux?

Who knows what drove him to the back of that showroom? Who knows if the signs were there, or if he'd walled them away from the world? 

All I know for sure is there's this video clip of him bearing that torch in Montreal three days before he killed himself, and the roar that washes down around him from every corner of the Bell Centre is huge, huge. In its midst, Lemieux wears a sort of fixed half-smile as he enters the arena, holds the torch up, shakes his other fist. The fixed half-smile never changes through all of it, never blooms to full wattage.

I don't know what that means. I don't know that it means anything. And I don't know that we'll ever know. 

The unknowable anguish: The tragic core of a tragedy.