Matthew Perry was much more than an addict. Don’t let his death overshadow that | Poorna Bell
WWhen I heard the news about Matthew Perry, there was a moment of silence, of inner collapse, like the moment when a soufflé gives up on itself. I wasn’t thinking about Friends, and without wanting to sound like an emotionless sociopath, it’s rare for a celebrity to die that I didn’t know moved me more than the sadness over the loss of any life.
But I thought about his life through the lens of addiction, and what he carried with him, and how it never left him. How his friends and family must have felt wanting the best life for him, only to find themselves caught in the maelstrom of chaos and watch his life end at just 54 years old. It’s a feeling that only those who live with addiction themselves, or those who love those who do, will know.
About ten years ago, my late husband Rob told me something earth-shattering, something that finally made sense of the increasingly bizarre behavior I had been noticing. Despite his work, he seemed to be constantly without money, he would fall asleep when we visited people, he would lie in bed sick for days, unable to move, and he would go to the corner store at odd hours. This happened for months, then years, and then I finally snapped and said had To tell me what was going on, he admitted that he had been a heroin addict for years.
I remember rushing downstairs to my study and hyperventilating. The only way I can describe the physical sensation was that it felt like the contents of my body were now on the outside. People often say in these types of scenarios that the partner “must have known,” but I really didn’t. I had no idea what heroin addiction looked like, and I certainly didn’t believe the man I married was lying to me. I knew something was wrong, but since mind reading doesn’t exist, I couldn’t force Rob to tell me until he was ready.
I made the decision to help him get clean and give him love and support. It changed everything I thought I knew about addiction. Previously, I had moralized about it from above, because I was a big believer in the “if they loved you, they would just stop” philosophy, even though at the time I didn’t understand anything about how addiction works.
At one of the first support group meetings I went to while helping Rob, I was told that addiction can lead to three things: recovery, prison, or death. Everyone, whether recovering addicts who have been addicted for a long time or loved ones who have been going to meetings for years, agreed.
I’ve written a lot over the years about suicide prevention (which is how Rob died), depression (which he had chronically), and addiction, and while we’ve moved the needle in terms of how we understand and talk about mental health, I know not how much progress we have made when it comes to addiction. We still wonder: why them and not me? Why can’t they just do what I do? Instead of thinking, what is this formidable thing that will force someone to do something that harms them, to the point where they could lose everyone in their life who loves them?
Rob died by suicide, but addiction played a huge role in how he got to that point. There are statistics that show that when depression is also present, especially if it is chronic, and especially for men, it can be a deadly combination. It not only takes out of you the things you might value, but replaces them with shame and guilt, and then: at the end of a long, dark tunnel, offers you a temporary solution. That cycle continues again and again.
The best insight I got into this was a speech Rob showed me, which he gave when he was asked to chair a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting. First, he quoted from the NA Manifesto: “An addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a constant and progressive disease whose goals are always the same: prisons, institutions and death.”
He then responded, “This statement resonates and irritates. I have a hard time coming to terms with the idea that my addiction is a “disease.” Is this the last of my pride? Or am I turning my back on an easy excuse? It doesn’t really matter.
“Growing up in a devout Christian home, the passage in the New Testament that meant the most to me was Jesus, a man, alone and about to die, who cried out on the cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me? ‘
“Drug addicts do not live in hell, that bustling metropolis of souls united in torment, but hang helplessly on a lonely hill, facing a future over which they have lost control, of more lies, shame, betrayal – a tomorrow in which they one more time before a god whose only currency is death, but who cannot be denied or abandoned without great suffering.”
Many things will be said about Perry in the coming week. I imagine not all of them will be his choice. In his recent memoir, he wrote about his efforts to help other addicts, including setting up a sober living facility in Malibu, and continued: “When I die, I know people will talk about friends, friends, friends… but when I die , as far as my so-called achievements go, it would be nice if Friends were way behind the things I did to help other people.
It reminded me of how strongly Rob felt about helping other people. How far he would go if someone needed it. How he would help out at Crisis, the homeless shelter, at Christmas, to be there at the point of the year when inequality between the haves and the have-nots was most acute.
It reminded me that when addiction is part of someone’s life, it is used to define who they were, when the reality is that, like everyone else, they had good and bad sides, and the stigma of it should never be used to Good. What a shame, what a waste, we say. And while that’s true, it’s important not to lose sight of the very best parts of it. Today I think of everyone who heard this news and felt the fluttering of a spirit, or the hair on the back of their neck standing up.