Fast Living

 My yardstick for celebrity death used to be my parents. If the deceased was younger than my parents, I figured they went too soon. As I grew older, that perspective changed. Once I had lapped John Belushi and Kurt Cobain as well as a great many of their contemporaries, I started to get a chill anytime someone passed ahead of me. I continue to be, by my definition, too young to die. 

Which is an interesting development for those of you who may have known me back in the days before I got into all this self-preservation business. While I cannot lay claim to ever having a "death wish" exactly, I can say that once upon a time my future was not painted with straight arrows and signs that read "proceed with caution." 

This tended to flavor my responses to those who lived fast and died young. There was a period of time when I didn't quite embrace that notion, but I did celebrate it. A bit. 

Which is why the death of Matthew Perry back in October of this year weighed heavily on my conscience. The old saw about "live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse" didn't quite pay off for him. Mister Perry's lifestyle was by his own accounts full of fast living, but the effects were not as glittery as the quote so often attributed to James Dean. First of all, that sentiment was first expressed in a 1949 movie that did not star James Dean. He just adopted it as his motto. Secondly, after his body was pulled from the wreckage of his Porsche, it wasn't all that pretty. 

Then there was the matter of Matthew Perry, beloved TV sitcom star and addict. He ended up living twice as long as James Dean, and his substance use and abuse took its toll on his health and well-being. When first responders came to his home, they pulled him from the hot tub where he had drowned. At the age of fifty-four. Which put him into my new classification of "too young to die." 

Except nobody, James Dean, John Belushi or Kurt Cobain would have survived the years of addiction to a variety of substances, and the near constant need to find that next great high. The autopsy results for Matthew Perry were released last week, and listed the cause of his death as "the acute effects of ketamine." Contributing factors were drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine. Once you get past the minor medical jargon, you can see that this was a person who died from taking too much medicine. Medicine that made him "better." For a time. 

And then suddenly not. I am currently ahead of Matthew Perry by a touchdown. And a freedom from many of the demons that brought him down.