On Matthew Perry, and those of us whose lives have been touched by addiction

Some thoughts on the complexity of a life

Credit: Matt Perry from Instagram

When I heard the news about Matthew Perry this morning, there was a moment of quietness, of inner collapse, like the moment a souffle gives up on itself. I wasn’t thinking about Friends, and without wanting to sound like an emotionless sociopath, usually the death of a celebrity I didn’t know doesn’t prompt something in me more than the initial sadness around a loss of life.

But I was thinking about his life viewed 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, having wanted the best life for him, having been caught in the maelstrom of chaos and unknowing only for it to be snuffed out at the young age of 54. It is a feeling that only those who live with addiction themselves, or who love those who do, will know.

About ten years ago, my late husband Rob told me something earth-shattering, that finally explained what I had noticed as increasingly bizarre behaviour. He seemed constantly out of money despite working, he’d fall asleep and start nodding when we visited other people, he would spend days sick and in bed, unable to move, and he’d go to the corner shop at odd times of night. This happened over months, years and finally when I snapped and said he HAD to tell me what was going on, he finally confessed that he was a heroin addict and had been for years.

I remember rushing downstairs to my study and hyperventilating. The only way I can describe the physical sensation of it was that it felt as if the contents of my body were now on the outside. (In scenarios like this, despite what people say about the partner and how they ‘must have known’, I didn’t know. I had no idea what heroin addiction looked like, and I certainly didn’t believe that 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.)

When faced with the reality, I made the decision to help him get clean and to provide love and support. It changed everything I thought I knew about addiction – previously something I had moralised from upon high, a strong subscriber to the ‘if they loved you they’d just stop’. Not understanding anything about how addiction works.

I now know a lot, and I’ve written a whole book about it so I won’t go on about it here, and besides, this is about Matthew Perry and all of us who heard the news today who were winched immediately to the history that lay in our own lives. But I remember in one of my first support group meetings I went to in the early days of me helping Rob, that I was told addiction results in three things. Recovery, jail or death. Everyone, both recovering addicts of many years, and loved ones who’d been going to meetings for many years, agreed with this.

A picture of Rob while we hiked in the Lake District

I have written a lot over the years about suicide prevention (it is how Rob died), depression (which he had chronically) and addiction. I would say that while we have moved the needle in terms of how we understand and talk about mental health, I don’t know how far we have come when it comes to addiction. It still seems to be the hardest thing to understand, to categorise.

As a society, I feel we are still fixated on the differences between us, making it impossible to move to the point of understanding. Why them and not me? Why can’t they just do what I do? Instead of thinking: what is this formidable thing that will compel a person to do something that will continue to damage and harm them, to the point where they may lose everyone in their life who loves them?

Rob died by suicide, but addiction played an enormous role in how he got to that point. There are statistics that show that when depression is also present, particularly if it is chronic, and particularly for men, it can be a lethal combination. Not only does it carve out the things you may value about yourself, but it replaces them with shame and guilt, and at the end of a long, dark tunnel, offers you a temporary solution, a reprieve. That cycle continues over and over again.

The best insight I had to this, was in a speech Rob showed me, that he delivered when asked to be the chair for an Narcotics Anonymous meeting:

(When reading from the NA manifesto) “Very simply, an addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death.”

This statement both resonates and rankles. I struggle to agree with the idea of my addiction as an ‘illness’. Is this the last of my pride? Or am I turning my back on an easy excuse?

It doesn’t really matter.

Having professed the non-religious nature of NA, I’m going to ruin it with a Biblical metaphor. Growing up in a devoutly Christian household, the passage in the New Testament that meant the most to me was Jesus, a man, alone and about to die, crying out on the Cross “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Drug addicts don’t live in Hell, that bustling metropolis of souls united in torment, but hang helpless on a lonely hill, facing a tomorrow over which they have lost control, of more lies, shame, betrayal, a tomorrow of abasing themselves once more before a God whose only currency is death, but cannot be denied or abandoned without great suffering.

Until or if that person finds sobriety, then there is a different set of problems: how to maintain and protect that at all costs. And in the midst of all of that, are those of us who love them, who are exhausted by the chaos and the lying, but who want the best for them, the life we know they deserve.

Over the next week, there will be a lot of tributes, things said about Matthew Perry. I imagine it will not be of his choosing. In his own words, he wrote about trying to help other addicts, and said: “When I die, I know people will talk about Friends, Friends, Friends….but when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try 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’d help out at Crisis, the homeless shelter, over Christmas, to be there at the point of the year when the disparity between the have and have nots was at its most acute.

It reminded me that when addiction is part of a person’s life, it is used to define who they were, when the reality is that like everyone, they had good and bad parts, and the stigma of it should never be used to scrub away the good. What a shame, what a waste, we say. And while it is, it’s important to not lose sight of the very best parts of them that wanted to help other people. And most importantly, who they were trying to help.

Legacy is an important thing to consider when we look at the life of the person who has just died, in order to uncover who they would have wanted us to help, and how they would have wanted their work to continue. I don’t have a neat way of wrapping this up. But I am thinking of all of you today, who heard the news, and felt the fluttering of a ghost or the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

Helpful stuff: Globally, there are 12-step groups to help the loved ones of addicts, Al-Anon, Ad Fam, Alateen for young people, and your local council/district may run groups themselves. In the UK, We Are With You is one of the leading charities, and NACOA is for adult children of alcoholics.